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Oliver Heaviside was born in the same London slums as Dickens was. Scarlet fever left him partly deaf. Heaviside finished his only schooling in 1865. He was 16 and a top student, but he'd failed geometry. He loathed all that jazz of deducing one fact from another. He meant to invent knowledge -- not to compute it. Heaviside went to work as a telegrapher. That drew him into the study of electricity. Then he read Maxwell's new …

…brilliance that was driving Heaviside faster than method could follow. He knew what he was doing. He growled at his detractors, "Shall I refuse my dinner because I do not fully understand ... digestion?" Like vector analysis, Heaviside's calculus stood the test of time. So did the rest of his work. He gave us the theory for long distance telephones. His math has served and shaped engineering. Yet his biographer, Paul Nahin, writes a sad ending.