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A comment on Maxwell's Equations first published 150 years ago.

Re:Maxwell's Equations first published 150 years ago by chris_va on Monday November 23, 2015 @08:52PM (#10618671)
Also credit to this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Heaviside

... Who took the original 20 equations and simplified them to the 4 we normally see.

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Re:Maxwell's Equations first published 150 years ago by Retric on Monday November 23, 2015 @09:01PM (#10618703)
That same year he patented, in England, the coaxial cable.

That's a fairly major footnote, on an interesting career. He seems to be one of those people who quietly had a significant impact on the future.

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Re:Maxwell's Equations first published 150 years ago by madengr on Monday November 23, 2015 @09:30PM (#10618817)
If you ever used Laplace transforms to solve differential equations, that is Heavisides work too.

Good book: http://www.amazon.com/Oliver-Heaviside-Electrical-Genius-Vic...

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Re:Maxwell's Equations first published 150 years ago by bainsfather on Tuesday November 24, 2015 @05:26AM (#10620044)
I've read that book, it is very good. A fantastic story/subject, though probably not for a general audience, just those interested in a detailed history of Heaviside and his work. It's nice to see a well-written 'technical' history book - so often such books are written by someone who doesn't really understand the subject - this is an exception.

You are mistaken about Laplace Transforms - Heaviside used a different method which was rather ad-hoc - sometimes it works, sometimes not. For the same problems, we now use Laplace Transforms instead, because they are better/cleaner.

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Re:Maxwell's Equations first published 150 years ago by juped on Tuesday November 24, 2015 @12:26AM (#10619268)
Heaviside was somewhat written out of history because he was considered a crank during his lifetime. His reputation is basically rehabilitated these days, but it's only physicists/mathematicians/engineers who have heard of him.
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Re:Maxwell's Equations first published 150 years ago by sklogic on Tuesday November 24, 2015 @03:18AM (#10619706)
His name was all over the physics textbooks, probably even more frequently than Maxwell, so he is not entirely forgotten.
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Re:Maxwell's Equations first published 150 years ago by arethuza on Tuesday November 24, 2015 @05:41AM (#10620079)
Bill Bryson mentions Heaviside in his latest book The Road to Little Dribbling.
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Re:Maxwell's Equations first published 150 years ago by femto on Monday November 23, 2015 @09:30PM (#10618816)
From the Wikipedia article:

"From 1882 to 1902, except for three years, he contributed regular articles to the trade paper The Electrician, which wished to improve its standing, for which he was paid £40 per year. This was hardly enough to live on, but his demands were very small and he was doing what he most wanted to. "

The prototypical hacker?

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Re:Maxwell's Equations first published 150 years ago by mgalka on Monday November 23, 2015 @10:57PM (#10619054)
One other guy who deserves some credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Minkowski

The first one to reduce them to a single equation, in relativistic form.

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Re:Maxwell's Equations first published 150 years ago by dboreham on Monday November 23, 2015 @09:11PM (#10618735)
In reading up on this the other day, when that Guardian article appeared, I was intrigued to find that there is a conspiracy theory types who advance the idea that Heaviside was the bad guy because he removed important parts of Maxwell's work that explains, well...X-Files type stuff. Read on: http://www.cheniere.org/references/maxwell.htm
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Re:Maxwell's Equations first published 150 years ago by Estragon on Monday November 23, 2015 @10:08PM (#10618930)
> This work is all documented in the hard French scientific literature.

Be nice to have some citations.

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Re:Maxwell's Equations first published 150 years ago by gaze on Monday November 23, 2015 @09:19PM (#10618776)
Man. What a pile of nonsense.
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