No label defined (Q4433650)

The British pioneer of electrical communication, Oliver Heaviside (1850--1925), had extensively used and further developed operational methods for solving differential equations in transmission-line problems during the 1880s and 1890s. Then these methods seemed largely forgotten and little used. But beginning in the 1910s there was arising a renewed interest of mainly electrical engineers in these methods, called then by Heaviside's American followers the `Heaviside operational calculus'. This process is described in the present paper very thoroughly, using a lot of publications and unpublished sources. The main attention is turned to the development of this calculus as an engineering analysis and constituent of electrical circuit theory (ca. 1915--1929). Specially John R. Carson's activity in justification of Heaviside's operational methods from the mathematical point of view is dealt with; this put these methods on a rigorous foundation [see \textit{J. Lützen}, Arch. Hist. Exact Sci. 21, 161--200 (1979; Zbl 0419.01016)]. Also Vannevar Bush's contribution is described. The mathematical support was given to him by Norbert Wiener, who afterwards worked out a rigorous approach to Heaviside's calculus, the basis being the Fourier transformation. The operational analysis was established as a recognized part of the electrical engineering course at the universities by Ernst J. Berg, who had the chance to visit Heaviside in his home in England and became one of his few friends. He elaborated his own way of deriving Heaviside's results by algebraic deductions as simpler and ``probably nearer Heaviside's own point of view'', but nevertheless as ``logically rigid''. But a certain kind of mystery around the operational methods remained. A. Einstein in his letter to Berg wrote about the ``peculiar mathematical witchcraft''. The books by Carson, Bush, Berg, and Cohen were warmly welcomed, re-edited and translated. Moreover, beginning in 1929, the Dutch electrical engineer Van der Pol had used the Laplace transformation to justify the operational calculus. In 1934 M. F. Gardner concluded that ``in recent developments there is evidence of a trend in operational calculus away from rather constraining concepts of `operator' and `operand' toward the more flexible and more powerful processes of the transform''. Nevertheless, in recent times several problem-solving and pedagogical advantages of Heaviside's operational calculus have been again stressed as compared to the Laplace transformation.