Back to the roots of vector and tensor calculus: Heaviside versus Gibbs (Q2040445)

The paper is devoted to the development of modern vector and tensor calculus, more exactly to works of Willard J. Gibbs, an American physicist, and Oliver Heaviside, a British scientist. Until the end of the 1880s, they worked separately using similar mathematical tools. In 1888, Gibbs sent a copy of his unprinted pamphlet \textit{Elements of vecor analysis} to Heaviside and to many other scientists in order to promote the use of vectors in physics. In the paper under review, the annotations to Gibb's work made by Heaviside are analysed and compared with Heaviside's published works \textit{Electrical papers} and \textit{Electromagnetic theory}. The most important annotations are considered in the main text of the paper and more ordinary ones in the appendix. It is argued that Gibb's booklet stimulated Heaviside's creativity.