Re: Today's jaw dropper

[Leigh Palmer <palmer@sfu.ca>]

> Don't you mean the way electrical engineers do mathematics?   Wasn't
> Heaviside the originator of generalized functions and Laurent Schwarz the
> legitimizer?   I see Dirac's name, but ...  Wouldn't the function precede
> its derivative?

Schwartz's (with a "t") "Theory of Distributions" was indeed the
legitimizer. Even after Schwartz's work one of my references says
the Dirac delta function was *not* considered a respectable
function by mathematicians, but they admitted the use of a symbol
with all the same properties. Physicists persist in this "error"
with considerable profit, however.

I think the Heaviside unit function predates the delta function,
but so what? Where is it written that a function must precede its
derivative (and what does that mean)? And how does that relate to
the discovery of the circular functions, sine and cosine? Clearly
neither could now exist had it relied upon the previous existence
of the other.

Leigh