Electromagnetic Theory (3 Volumes) (v. 3) [Hardcover]

Oliver Heaviside (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 082840237X | ISBN-13: 978-0828402378 | Publication Date: 1971 | Edition: 3

Third edition, with a foreword by Sir Edmund Whittaker. Oliver Heaviside continued active scientific work for more than twenty years after the publication of the third volume of his Electromagnetic Theory. His unpublished notes, some of which were found in 1957, contained many discoveries: the ways in which Heaviside's ideas developed during those twenty years is included in two lengthy appendices in this 1971 edition.

Editorial Reviews

Book Description

Oliver Heaviside FRS (1850-1925) was a brilliant self-taught electrical engineer, physicist and mathematician. Published in 1899, this is the second of three volumes covering his electromagnetic theory. Here, he argues that physical problems drive mathematical ideas, and goes on to compare the propagation of electromagnetic waves with physical analogues. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 1717 pages
• Publisher: Chelsea Pub Co; 3 edition (1971)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 082840237X
• ISBN-13: 978-0828402378
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,286,676 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A 3 volume collection of papers by an influential engineer, March 16, 2002

By 

Mr. Leslie O. Green (Oxford (UK)) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Electromagnetic Theory (3 Volumes) (v. 3) (Hardcover)

This is not a single book it is a set of 3 hardbacks:

Vol 1 is 504 pages and consists of Heaviside's papers published in the Electrician of 1891 to 1893. Vol II is 547 pages and consists Heaviside's papers published in the Electrician of 1894 to 1898. Vol III is 666 pages and consists of Heaviside's papers in the published Electrician of 1900 to 1912. It also contains papers published in Nature during this same interval. Additionally there are 140 pages of unpublished notes discovered after Heaviside's death.

Heaviside evidently published a lot of material and was a very influential engineer both in his time and subsequently. His views on Electromagnetic Theory, and in particular on transmission line theory, shaped the whole development of the subject. His arguments with the influential "experts" of his day are made public in these republished papers. Not all of his criticisms were polite and this certainly comes across in these papers!

Heaviside was a man of very limited financial resources and yet still managed to achieve scientific greatness and esteem from the great men of his time. The other men of great influence, but little ability, with whom he crossed swords, all seem to have fallen by the wayside, leaving Heaviside's viewpoint as dominant. Somehow Heaviside never translated his intellectual and scientific ability and contributions into enough finances to support him. He was desperately poor throughout his life, even having the gas supply to his home cut off during winter months due to non-payment of bills. It is therefore fitting that these volumes be read and appreciated by future generations as his reward. You may of course have heard of the Heaviside operator in calculus, the Heaviside step function, the Kennelly-Heaviside layer in the ionosphere, the Heaviside-Feynman formula for the radiated field of a moving charged particle. There is a lot of other stuff which did not get Heaviside's name on it, such as the telegrapher's equation.

Throughout, Heaviside tries to explain things in easy to understand terms using simple notation. He hated the wretched gothic fonts used by Maxwell in the famous treatise (and on this point anyone who has ever read Maxwell will easily agree!) and he introduced the bold faced fonts for the D, E, B and H vector fields that are still used today.

This collection of papers is an honest and non-pompous piece of work. It is actually pleasurable to read and to compare against more modern writers on the same subject. The reader will perhaps forgive Heaviside for his lack of (false) modesty. After all, this fame is evidently the greater part of what he personally received from his publications by way of a reward.