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

Abstract: In June 1888, Oliver Heaviside received by mail an officially unpublished pamphlet, which was written and printed by the American author Willard J. Gibbs around 1881-1884. This original document is preserved in the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC. Heaviside studied Gibbs's work very carefully and wrote some annotations in the margins of the booklet. He was a strong defender of Gibbs's work on vector analysis against quaternionists, even if he criticized Gibbs's notation system. The aim of our paper is to analyse Heaviside's annotations and to investigate the role played by the American physicist in the development of Heaviside's work.

Review text

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.

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