Generalised Functions

R F Hoskins 1979 Chichester: Ellis Horwood (John Wiley) 192 pp price £15 A reasonable case could be made for naming Oliver Heaviside as one of the inventors of generalised functions; he used the step function in his operational methods and was ostracised by right-thinking mathematicians for getting the correct answers by nonrigorous methods. Elsewhere, the delta function was implicit in the use of Green functions for solving differential equations, but generalised functions did not become respectable until the 1950s.