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{{Infobox scientist
| name = Oliver Heaviside
| birth_date = {{birth date|1850|05|18|mf=y}}
| birth_place = Camden Town, London, England
| death_date = {{death date and age|1925|2|3|1850|5|18}}
| death_place = Torquay, Devon, England
| nationality = British
| fields = Electrical engineering, mathematics, electromagnetism
| known_for = Vector form of [[James Clerk Maxwell|Maxwell]]'s equations, operational calculus, the telegrapher's equations, inductive loading, the Heaviside layer, the gravitational analogue of electromagnetism
}}

'''Oliver Heaviside''' (18 May 1850 – 3 February 1925) was a self-taught English electrical engineer and mathematician who reshaped classical electromagnetism into the form in which it is now taught, and who published in 1893 an electromagnetic analogue for gravitation that is the direct ancestor of the gravitomagnetic models developed by researchers catalogued on this wiki.

Heaviside left school at sixteen, worked as a telegraph operator in Newcastle, and from his early twenties onward carried out his research alone and largely without institutional support or income. Between 1884 and 1885 he took [[James Clerk Maxwell]]'s treatment of the electromagnetic field — a set of twenty equations in twenty variables, expressed largely in terms of potentials — and, using the vector notation he developed in parallel with Josiah Willard Gibbs, reduced it to the '''four vector equations''' now universally known as Maxwell's equations. He introduced the operational calculus for solving differential equations, work whose rigour was disputed at the time and justified only later through Laplace-transform methods. He derived the '''telegrapher's equations''' and showed that adding inductance to a transmission line reduces distortion — the principle of inductive loading, which made long-distance telephony practical. He arrived independently at the energy-flux vector usually named after Poynting. In 1902 he proposed a conducting layer in the upper atmosphere to explain the reception of radio signals beyond the horizon, the Kennelly–Heaviside layer, later identified as part of the ionosphere.

Much of the standard vocabulary of electrical science is his coinage: '''impedance, inductance, conductance, admittance, permeability, reluctance, permittance''' and '''electret''' are all Heaviside's words.

In 1893, in ''The Electrician'', Heaviside published "A Gravitational and Electromagnetic Analogy", proposing that gravitation propagates at finite speed and possesses a second, velocity-dependent field component analogous to the magnetic field of a moving charge. This is the origin of what is now called '''gravitomagnetism''' — a weak-field structure that also emerges from general relativity, and which underlies effects such as frame dragging.

==On this wiki==

Heaviside is invoked here mainly through two threads.

'''Gravitomagnetism.''' [[Thierry De Mees]] has built an entire research programme on the field Heaviside proposed, which he calls the '''Heaviside field''' or ''gyrotation''. His ''[[A Coherent Dual Vector Field Theory for Gravitation]]'' sets out the theory; ''[[Analytic Description of Cosmic Phenomena Using the Heaviside Field]]'' (''Physics Essays'', 2005) applies it to rotating stars and disc galaxies; and ''[[Gravitomagnetism: Successes in Explaining the Cosmos]]'' (2010) collects the applications — the bending of light, Mercury's perihelion advance, meson lifetimes and the flat rotation curves of spiral galaxies. In ''[[Deduction of Orbital Velocities in Disk Galaxies. "Dark Matter": a myth?]]'' De Mees argues that the second field term removes the need for [[Dark Matter|dark matter]] altogether. The claim that a Heaviside-type gravitational theory reproduces the classic relativistic tests is disputed, and this wiki records it as De Mees's position rather than as settled result.

'''Electromagnetic theory and its history.''' [[Ivor Catt]] treats Heaviside as the central and unjustly displaced figure of electromagnetic theory, arguing that the transmission-line picture of energy flow — the '''Heaviside signal''', a transverse electromagnetic step travelling in the space between conductors — is more fundamental than the "electric current" of the textbooks. See ''[[The Heaviside Signal]]'' (1979), ''[[The Death of Electric Current]]'' (1982) and ''[[What Happened to Electromagnetic Theory]]'' (2012). Catt also discovered and edited G. F. C. Searle's memoir of Heaviside, published as ''[[Oliver Heaviside the Man]]'' (1987) — Searle knew Heaviside for thirty-three years, and it remains the only extended biographical account. [[Eric R Laithwaite]] wrote on him under the title ''[[Oliver Heaviside - Establishment Shaker]]'' (1982).

Heaviside also appears throughout the classical-electrodynamics literature collected here as the person responsible for the modern form of the field equations, and therefore as a party to disputes about what was lost in that reformulation — the elimination of the potentials as physically real quantities, and the disappearance of Maxwell's mechanical aether. [[Oleg D Jefimenko]]'s work on retarded fields and causality, and the work indexed under [[:Category:Electrodynamics]] and [[:Category:Electromagnetism]], engage this question directly. [[Tom Bearden]] argues that the reduction discarded terms of practical importance, a much stronger claim that is not shared by most contributors here.

Heaviside's biography is also a recurring reference point in this wiki's own arguments about scientific institutions: a man who did first-rank work in isolation, published in a trade journal, quarrelled with the Royal Society's referees, and lived his last years in poverty in Torquay.

==See also==

* [[James Clerk Maxwell]]
* [[Thierry De Mees]]
* [[Ivor Catt]]
* [[Oleg D Jefimenko]]
* [[Dark Matter]]
* [[:Category:Electromagnetism|Category: Electromagnetism]]

[[Category:Scientist|Heaviside Oliver]]
[[Category:Electromagnetism|Heaviside Oliver]]
[[Category:Electrodynamics|Heaviside Oliver]]
[[Category:Gravity|Heaviside Oliver]]

Oliver Heaviside - Revision history

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