Oliver Heaviside: Maverick Mastermind of Electricity - Brossura

Mahon, Basil

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0863419658 ISBN 13: 9780863419652

Casa editrice: Inst of Engineering & Technology, 2009

Riassunto

Oliver Heaviside (1850-1925) was one of the great pioneers of electrical science. His ideas led to huge advances in communications and now form much of the bedrock of electrical engineering - every textbook and every college course bears his stamp. Despite having little formal education he created the mathematical tools that were to prove essential to the proper understanding and use of electricity. At first his ideas were thought to be outrageous and he had to battle long and hard against ignorance, prejudice and vested interests to get them accepted. Yet they are now so much a part of everyday electrical science that they are simply taken for granted and our great debt to him is rarely acknowledged. Caring nothing for social or mathematical conventions, he lived a fiercely independent life, much of the time close to poverty. His writings reveal a personality like no other and are laced with wickedly irreverent humour; he is by far the funniest author of scientific papers. Basil Mahon combines a compelling account of Heaviside's life with a powerful insight into his scientific thinking and the reasons for its enduring influence.

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Recensione:

Heaviside may not be as well known as his 19th century contemporaries Maxwell and Kelvin, but when we talk about Maxwell s equations today, it is Heaviside s tidy vector formulation that we mean, not Maxwell s ponderous 20-variable original. This biography of the brilliant-but-odd electromagnetism pioneer, who gave journal editors nightmares by speckling his papers with libellous attacks on his opponents is a great introduction to an often overlooked figure. --Physics World, December 2009

L'autore:

A former officer in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, Basil Mahon is a retired Government Statistician who ran the 1991 census in England and Wales and has had a lifelong passion for the physical sciences. Oliver Heaviside follows up his acclaimed book The Man Who Changed Everything , a biography of Heaviside s own hero, James Clerk Maxwell.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Inst of Engineering & Technology
• Data di pubblicazione: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0863419658
• ISBN 13: 9780863419652
• Rilegatura: Paperback
• Numero di pagine: 183