Heaviside is well worth looking at anyway. I don't know much about him personally, aside from the fact that the unit step function is named after him (in a classical case of "let's reduce a profound body of work to one incidental concept to which we attach the name"; see also the Kronecker delta), but I do know that his work was deep and, like much work destined to be of importance in applied mathematics, initially offended mathematicians by its emphasis on practicalities rather than mathematical purity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Heaviside
I've been reading a book about Heaviside (Forgotten Genius). Something I had not appreciated was that he was an Engineer. I suppose I imagined a nerdy dude in his mother's basement trying to reformulate Maxwell's work. But in reality he was a guy who spent his working life trying to do things like find the location of breaks in subsea cables; figure out how to transmit higher data rates through long cables, and so on. It was in trying to solve these engineering problems that he ended up becoming interested in the mathematics of transmission line propagation and hence Maxwell's work.
I agree - there is a great book by Paul Nahin. I bought it since I wanted to understand how someone got the idea of using complex numbers in electrical engineering. But I have found the book to be very hard to skim. I really have to work along with it to understand the technicalities.
Agreed as well. Nahin is comprehensive and authoritative, but a good biography of Heaviside for people who aren't already physicists or engineers has yet to be written (or at least yet to be discovered by me.)
