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Oliver Heaviside, (born May 18, 1850, London—died Feb. 3, 1925, Torquay, Devon, Eng.), physicist who predicted the existence of the ionosphere, an electrically conductive layer in the upper atmosphere that reflects radio waves. In 1870 he became a telegrapher, but increasing deafness forced him to retire in 1874.

The modern form of the equations in their most common formulation is credited to Oliver Heaviside. [1] Maxwell's equations may be combined to demonstrate how fluctuations in electromagnetic fields (waves) propagate at a constant speed in vacuum, c ( 299 792 458 m/s ). [2]

Heaviside, Oliver. ( b. Camden Town, London, England, 18 May 1850; d. Paignton, Devonshire, England, 3 February 1925) physics, electrical engineering. Heaviside was the youngest of four sons of Thomas Heaviside, an artist, and Rachel Elizabeth West, whose sister Emma married Charles Wheatstone in 1847. There is no evidence that his famous uncle ...

The possibility of gravitational waves was discussed in 1893 by Oliver Heaviside, using the analogy between the inverse-square law of gravitation and the electrostatic force.

Oliver Heaviside was born in 1850 in Camden Town, a notoriously crime-ridden, lower class area of London. Young Oliver had a challenging and troubled youth. Life in the slums was difficult enough, but a childhood bout with scarlet fever, which left him nearly deaf, added to his troubles.

Oliver Heaviside invented the modern vector notation and applied it to Maxwell's field equations; he also (in 1885 and 1889) had fixed the mistakes of Thomson's derivation and arrived at the correct form of the magnetic force on a moving charged object.

Oliver Heaviside. Oliver Heaviside was a self-taught scholar who reformulated Maxwell's field equations in terms of electric and magnetic forces and energy flux, and independently co-formulated vector analysis.

There were many attempts in the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century—like those of British physicists J. J. Thomson in 1881 and Oliver Heaviside in 1889, and George Frederick Charles Searle in 1897, German physicists Wilhelm Wien in 1900 and Max Abraham in 1902, and the Dutch physicist Hendrik Antoon Lorentz in 1904—to understand how ...