Oliver Heaviside: Sage in Solitude : The Life, Work, and Times of an Electrical Genius of the Victorian Age [Hardcover]

Paul J. Nahin (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Ieee (February 1988)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0879422386
• ISBN-13: 978-0879422387
• Product Dimensions: 10.3 x 7.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,753,508 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Paul Nahin was born in California, and did all his schooling there (Brea-Olinda High 1958, Stanford BS 1962, Caltech MS 1963, and - as a Howard Hughes Staff Doctoral Fellow - UC/Irvine PhD 1972). (The lovely lady in the photo is his wife of 49 years, Patricia.) He worked as a digital logic designer and radar systems engineer in the Southern California aerospace industry until 1971, when he started his academic career. He has taught at Harvey Mudd College, the Naval Postgraduate School, and the Universities of New Hampshire (where he is now emeritus professor of electrical engineering) and Virginia. In between and here-and-there he spent a post-doctoral year at the Naval Research Laboratory, and a summer and a year at the Center for Naval Analyses and the Institute for Defense Analyses as a weapon systems analyst, all in Washington, DC. He has published a couple dozen short science fiction stories in ANALOG, OMNI, and TWILIGHT ZONE magazines, and has written 11 books on mathematics and physics, published by IEEE Press, Springer, and the university presses of Johns Hopkins and Princeton. His new book NUMBER-CRUNCHING was published by Princeton in September 2011, and Johns Hopkins recently reprinted his 1997 book TIME TRAVEL FOR WRITERS. Princeton has just released the corrected paperback edition of his 2006 book DR. EULER'S FABULOUS FORMULA. He has just completed (for Princeton) his next book, ELECTRIC LOGIC, that treats the works of George Boole and Claude Shannon and how they created the information age (to be published 2012). Two of his other Princeton math books, CHASES & ESCAPES and DUELLING IDIOTS, are scheduled to be reprinted in 2012, each with a new Preface (the one in CHASES includes an analysis of the B-29 Enola Gay's escape maneuver from the blast wave of the atomic bomb drop on Hiroshima). He has given invited talks on mathematics at Bowdoin College, the Claremont Graduate School, the University of Tennessee, and Caltech, has appeared on National Public Radio's "Science Friday" show, and advised Boston's WGBH Public Television's "Nova" program on the script for their time travel episode. He recently gave the invited Sampson Lectures for 2011 in Mathematics at Bates College (Lewiston, Maine). When he isn't writing he is battling evil-doers on his Xbox360S and, now and then, he even wins. (And he gives a big thumb's up to Valve's terrific PORTAL 2, as well as to the oldie-but-still-goodie original Xbox greats RETURN TO CASTLE WOLFENSTEIN:TIDES OF WAR and THIEF:DEADLY SHADOWS!)

FINALLY - readers have written asking about the solutions manual to THE SCIENCE OF RADIO. I now have the pdf file (3 MB) for the solutions, and if you write to me I'll send you a copy. [e-mail]

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Out-of-Print----BUT NOT FOR LONG, March 15, 2001

By 

Paul J. Nahin (Durham, NH USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Oliver Heaviside: Sage in Solitude : The Life, Work, and Times of an Electrical Genius of the Victorian Age (Hardcover)

As the author of this book, you may want to ignore my rating! I am really writing to simply note that the book will be reprinted late in 2001 or early in 2002 by The Johns Hopkins University Press. I have written a new introduction for the JHUP edition to bring the book up-to-date on all the latest about Heaviside.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Revealing biography of a hermit genius, July 31, 2004

By 

A reader (Shrewsbury, MA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Oliver Heaviside: Sage in Solitude : The Life, Work, and Times of an Electrical Genius of the Victorian Age (Hardcover)

Oliver Heaviside was born in London in 1850, the youngest of four sons of a poor and often brutal wood engraver. Oliver never attended college and had only one job for only six years: as a telegraph clerk and technician. Nevertheless he taught himself college-level mathematics and physics. He grew to become a respected expert in electromagnetism: He independently developed vector analysis and thereby cast Maxwell's equations into their modern form. He also studied transmission lines, inventing operator calculus to do so. In studying the electrodynamics of a moving charged sphere, he, with George Searle, anticipated aspects of Einstein's special relativity. However, throughout his adult life he seems to have been handicapped by chronic depression, which made him a cantankerous loner.

This book will be understood and appreciated best by readers who are familiar with college-level electromagnetism. However, the author does try to appeal to a wider audience: he relegates mathematical aspects of Heaviside's work to appendices. (I would have preferred more math since that's the basis of Heaviside's reputation.) The text is liberally sprinkled with excerpts from Heaviside's correspondence and with the author's first-person comments. (I would have preferred a little less of both.) References are abundant. This book should be regarded as the definitive biography of this curious, inspiring genius.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars The Book's title is misleading, February 4, 2011

By 

Ray - See all my reviews

This review is from: Oliver Heaviside: Sage in Solitude : The Life, Work, and Times of an Electrical Genius of the Victorian Age (Hardcover)

This book was suggested to me by my EM professor, because I am doing an independent study on EE history. I tried...I REALLY tried reading this book. And it reads like molasses in January. I was able to drag the reading out to chapter 7. My biggest complaint about the book is that the title of the book is misleading. The book's title should be changed, to what? How about, "Victorian England, Preece, Telegraphy, Maxwell, Maxwell's equations, Wheatstone, Thomson, etc., oh yeah and Oliver Heaviside, too."
I wanted to find out about Oliver Heaviside, the man and his life. However, after seven chapters of the same thing, in which 80% of each chapter is about everybody else, and 20% what O.H. thought about the first 80%, I had to cry "uncle!" and put the book down. What is the difference between accuracy and precision? Let's just say that the author was accurate about his topic...but not precise. (Just google "what is the difference between accuracy & precission?" and click on images, and you'll get the idea.)
I will applaud Dr. Nahin for striking a balance between story, mathematics and EM theory. However, I wished that Dr. Nahin would have struck a better balance between his subject and his subject's environment. Sadly, I ended up believing that the book's topic of least importance, was Oliver Heaviside.