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As I understood it, this was more in response to academics' frustration that he did not properly define operators he went on to use in his derivations. I can sy
by hazz 12y ago
As I understood it, this was more in response to academics' frustration that he did not properly define operators he went on to use in his derivations. I can sympathise with this - mathematical proofs are difficult enough to follow without having to guess the action of the operators involved.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- jacquesm 12y agoThat's why operator overloading is a bad idea, even if it gives you nice matrix operations in C++. The amount of times I came across abuse of this facility is much larger than the number of times where it actually made sense.
- ky3 12y agomathematical proofs are difficult enough to follow without having to guess the action of the operators involved. What Heaviside did was the sort of fast-and-loose syntactic manipulation that makes mathematicians queasy and/or indignant [1]. He treats the derivative operator just like it were an ordinary number X. And then he infers that 1/X must mean integration. Compare to the naive argument for the positive integers 1+2+3+... summing to -1/12 that gets mathbabe's panties in a twist [2]. More details in Ch. 10 of Nahin's book. [1] http://myreckonings.com/wordpress/2007/12/07/heavisides-operator-calculus/ http://myreckonings.com/wordpress/2007/12/07/heavisides-oper... [2] http://mathbabe.org/2014/01/21/if-its-hocus-pocus-then-its-not-math/ http://mathbabe.org/2014/01/21/if-its-hocus-pocus-then-its-n...