Oliver Heaviside FRS was an English self-taught mathematician and physicist who invented a new technique for solving differential equations, independently developed vector calculus, and rewrote Maxwell's equations in the form commonly used today. He significantly shaped the way Maxwell's equations are understood and applied in the decades following Maxwell's death. His formulation of the telegrapher's equations became commercially important during his own lifetime, after their significance went unremarked for a long while, as few others were versed at the time in his novel methodology. Although at odds with the scientific establishment for most of his life, Heaviside changed the face of telecommunications, mathematics, and science.

In mathematics, the Laplace transform, named after its discoverer Pierre-Simon Laplace, is an integral transform that converts a function of a real variable to a function of a complex variable .