Oliver Heaviside (May 18, 1850 - February 3, 1925) was a self-taught English electrical engineer, mathematician, and physicist who adapted complex numbers to the study of electrical circuits, developed techniques for applying Laplace transforms to the solution of differential equations, reformulated Maxwell's field equations in terms of electric and magnetic forces and energy flux, and independently co-formulated vector analysis. Wikipedia
The definitive Wikipedia entry for Oliver Heaviside. Wikipedia is the biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the Internet. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Heaviside
Academic subjects seemed to hold little attraction for Heaviside however and at age 16 he left school. Perhaps he was more disillusioned with school than with learning since he continued to study after leaving school, in particular he learnt Morse code, www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/history/Biographies/Heavisid...
Oliver W. Heaviside was born on May 18, 1850 in Camden Town, London, England, the youngest of four sons of Thomas Heaviside , an engraver and watercolorist, and Rachel Elizabeth West , a sister-in-law of the famous physicist Sir Charles Wheatstone . Oliv people.clarkson.edu/%7Eekatz/scientists/heaviside.html
Heaviside introduced operational calculus to enable him to solve the ordinary DEs which came out of the theory of electrical circuits. He replaced the differential operator d / dx by a variable p transforming a differential equation into an algebraic equ www.intmath.com/Laplace-transformation/Heaviside.php
