Quotations

Oliver Heaviside


View the biography of Oliver Heaviside


There is no absolute scale of size in the Universe, for it is boundless towards the great and also boundless towards the small.
Quoted in D'A W Thompson On Growth and Form (Cambridge 1917)
Why should I refuse a good dinner simply because I don't understand the digestive processes involved.
[reply when criticised for his daring use of operators before they could be justified formally.]
Logic can be patient, for it is eternal.
Quoted in D MacHale, Comic Sections (Dublin 1993)
This series is divergent, therefore we may be able to do something with it.
Euclid for children is barbarous.
Quoted in D MacHale, Comic Sections (Dublin 1993)
It is perhaps too much to expect a man to be both the prince of experimentalists and a competent mathematician.
Electromagnetic theory Vol 1 Ch 1