Heaviside and the Operational Calculus

Abstract

The centenary of the birth of Oliver Heaviside last year has been the occasion of celebration by electrical engineers and physicists in this and other countries. In the discussions of his work much has been said about the Operational Calculus ; and as the versions of its history which have been given both in these commemorative celebrations and in most of the textbooks of the subject are seriously incorrect, this may serve as an occasion to recount that history more correctly. The story in widest circulation is that the Operational Calculus was discovered by Heaviside (Boole being sometimes—and incorrectly—named as the discoverer of its applications to ordinary differential equations) and rejected by British mathematicians because of Heaviside’s lack of rigour. The facts, as I shall show, are that the Calculus was well known in Britain and France before Heaviside’s birth, and that the rejection of his paper had nothing to do with his use of symbolic methods.