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Comment by tim333 | Hacker News Reader

Spoken language has a lot going for it. I note the featured article and it's discussion are all words not maths.

By the way looking at Maxwell's paper it seems awful complicated https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rstl.1865...

compared to the modern form of the equations https://ethw.org/w/images/d/d6/Maxwell_image_02.jpg

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>compared to the modern form of the equations

Are the Geometric Algebra...

    ∇F = μ₀cJ

..and Differential Form...

    dF = 0
    d⋆F = J

...equivalents post-modern?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_descriptions_of_t...

Heaviside thought that too which is why he invented the modern form. Not that he just used a different set of math to describe the problem, he invented the math too.

The modern form of the equations was worked out by commoners, so had to be filtered through the work of others before it could be taught.

You're really caught up on this commoner/non-commoner dynamic (from your other comments). Was it really that important? - many of the well known scientists of that time were 'commoners'.

I'm not, but they were. But it was not discussed openly in print at the time, and so must be inferred.

I just read his Wikipedia and he was sponsored by his uncle Sir Charles Wheatstone of Wheatstone bridge fame and ended up a Fellow of the Royal Society so was not so badly situated.

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