I Love Physics
Heaviside And Gibbs Deserve Some Of Maxwell's Fame... The name "Maxwell's equations" honours the greatest physicist between Newton and Einstein. But Clerk Maxwell did not discover his eponymous equations; when Maxwell was alive, vector calculus was unknown. In particular, the curl and divergence operators were unknown.
We owe Maxwell's equations to Oliver Heaviside, the self-taught British electrical engineer who discovered an immense amount of EMF theory, laid the groundwork for radio and TV broadcasting, and discovered vector calculus and the Laplace transform.
"Heaviside did much to develop and advocate vector methods and the vector calculus. Maxwell's formulation of electromagnetism consisted of 20 equations in 20 variables. Heaviside employed the curl and divergence operators of the vector calculus to reformulate 12 of these 20 equations into four equations in four variables (B, E, J and ρ), the form by which they have been known ever since."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Heaviside#Innovations_and_discoveries
If 4 equations in 4 variables strikes you as much less unwieldy than 20 equations in 20 variables, you are in good company. We also owe vector calculus to the great American scientist Willard Gibbs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josiah_Willard_Gibbs#Vector_analysis
Gibbs's vector calculus reformulation of electrodynamics did not become well known until his student E B Wilson reworked Gibbs's lecture notes into an undergraduate text, published in 1901.
We owe Maxwell's equations to Oliver Heaviside, the self-taught British electrical engineer who discovered an immense amount of EMF theory, laid the groundwork for radio and TV broadcasting, and discovered vector calculus and the Laplace transform.
"Heaviside did much to develop and advocate vector methods and the vector calculus. Maxwell's formulation of electromagnetism consisted of 20 equations in 20 variables. Heaviside employed the curl and divergence operators of the vector calculus to reformulate 12 of these 20 equations into four equations in four variables (B, E, J and ρ), the form by which they have been known ever since."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Heaviside#Innovations_and_discoveries
If 4 equations in 4 variables strikes you as much less unwieldy than 20 equations in 20 variables, you are in good company. We also owe vector calculus to the great American scientist Willard Gibbs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josiah_Willard_Gibbs#Vector_analysis
Gibbs's vector calculus reformulation of electrodynamics did not become well known until his student E B Wilson reworked Gibbs's lecture notes into an undergraduate text, published in 1901.
70-79, M