Timeline for How should one present curl and divergence in an undergraduate multivariable calculus class?
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| Apr 4, 2011 at 0:48 | comment | added | Toby Bartels | I don't know how it was originally, but in Maxwell's day, the divergence was called the ‘convergence’ and measured with the opposite sign. When Gibbs and Heaviside pushed using 3-vectors with the dot and cross products in place of Hamilton's quaternions, they also pushed for using divergence in place of convergence. (Divergence comes directly from a dot product, as we all know from their notation which is still used today, while the quaternionic product has this term with the opposite sign.) | |
| Apr 21, 2010 at 18:43 | history | answered | Willie Wong | CC BY-SA 2.5 |