Oliver Heaviside (/ˈhɛvisaɪd/, HEH-vee-syde; 18 May 1850 – 3 February 1925) was an English mathematician and physicist who invented a new technique for solving differential equations (equivalent to the Laplace transform), independently developed vector calculus, and rewrote Maxwell's equations in the form commonly used today.

His formulation of the telegrapher's equations became commercially important during his own lifetime, after their significance went unremarked for a long while, as few others were versed at the time in his novel methodology.

[2] Although at odds with the scientific establishment for most of his life, Heaviside changed the face of telecommunications, mathematics, and science.

He was a short and red-headed child, and suffered from scarlet fever when young, which left him with a hearing impairment.

[4]: 51 Heaviside's uncle by marriage was Sir Charles Wheatstone (1802–1875), an internationally celebrated expert in telegraphy and electromagnetism, and the original co-inventor of the first commercially successful telegraph in the mid-1830s.

Heaviside continued to study while working, and by the age of 22 he published an article in the prestigious Philosophical Magazine on 'The Best Arrangement of Wheatstone's Bridge for measuring a Given Resistance with a Given Galvanometer and Battery'[6] which received positive comments from physicists who had unsuccessfully tried to solve this algebraic problem, including Sir William Thomson, to whom he gave a copy of the paper, and James Clerk Maxwell.

[4]: 60 In 1873, Heaviside had encountered Maxwell's newly published, and later famous, two-volume Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism.

I had no knowledge of mathematical analysis (having learned only school algebra and trigonometry which I had largely forgotten) and thus my work was laid out for me.

[8] Undertaking research from home, he helped develop transmission line theory (also known as the "telegrapher's equations").

However the paper was blocked by Arthur's superior, William Henry Preece of the Post Office, because part of the proposal was that loading coils (inductors) should be added to telephone and telegraph lines to increase their self-induction and correct the distortion which they suffered.

Heaviside was also convinced that Preece was behind the sacking of the editor of The Electrician which brought his long-running series of articles to a halt (until 1891).

In 1897, AT&T employed one of its own scientists, George A. Campbell, and an external investigator Michael I. Pupin to find some respect in which Heaviside's work was incomplete or incorrect.

However, Heaviside refused the offer, declining to accept any money unless the company were to give him full recognition.

In 1896, FitzGerald and John Perry obtained a civil list pension of £120 per year for Heaviside, who was now living in Devon, and persuaded him to accept it, after he had rejected other charitable offers from the Royal Society.

The predictions by Heaviside, combined with Planck's radiation theory, probably discouraged further attempts to detect radio waves from the Sun and other astronomical objects.

[19] Mathematician Howard Eves has commented that Heaviside "was the only first-rate physicist at the time to impugn Einstein, and his invectives against relativity theory often bordered on the absurd".

Behrend, he became a recluse who was so averse to meeting people that he delivered the manuscripts of his Electrician papers to a grocery store, where the editors picked them up.

Heaviside also reportedly started painting his fingernails pink and had granite blocks moved into his house for furniture.

[21] Heaviside died on 3 February 1925, at Torquay in Devon after falling from a ladder,[22] and is buried near the eastern corner of Paignton cemetery.

[23] He was always held in high regard by most electrical engineers, particularly after his correction to Kelvin's transmission line analysis was vindicated, but most of his wider recognition was gained posthumously.

[27] A collection of Heaviside's papers is held at the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) Archive Centre.

Less well known is that Heaviside's equations and Maxwell's are not exactly the same, and in fact it is easier to modify the former to make them compatible with quantum physics.

As he advocated abolishing this negativity, he has been credited by C. J. Joly[36] with developing hyperbolic quaternions, though in fact that mathematical structure was largely the work of Alexander Macfarlane.

Closely related to this was his discovery that telephone transmission could be greatly improved by placing electrical inductance in series with the cable.

In 1947 Edward Victor Appleton received the Nobel Prize in Physics for proving that this layer really existed.