Also credit to this guy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Heaviside
... Who took the original 20 equations and simplified them to the 4 we normally see.
... Who took the original 20 equations and simplified them to the 4 we normally see.
That's a fairly major footnote, on an interesting career. He seems to be one of those people who quietly had a significant impact on the future.
Good book: http://www.amazon.com/Oliver-Heaviside-Electrical-Genius-Vic...
You are mistaken about Laplace Transforms - Heaviside used a different method which was rather ad-hoc - sometimes it works, sometimes not. For the same problems, we now use Laplace Transforms instead, because they are better/cleaner.
"From 1882 to 1902, except for three years, he contributed regular articles to the trade paper The Electrician, which wished to improve its standing, for which he was paid £40 per year. This was hardly enough to live on, but his demands were very small and he was doing what he most wanted to. "
The prototypical hacker?
The first one to reduce them to a single equation, in relativistic form.
Be nice to have some citations.