Appendix A The Laplace Transform
The Laplace transform was discovered originally by Leonhard Euler (1707–1783), the great 18th-century Swiss mathematician and physicist, but is named in honor of a French mathematician and astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827), who used the transform in his work on probability theory. He was such a genius not only in mathematics that the great mathematician Simeon Poisson (1781–1840) labeled him the Isaac Newton of France, but also in politics that he could serve three regimes in revolutionary France – the republic, the empire of Napoleon, and the Bourbon restoration, having been bestowed a count from Napoleon and a marquis from Louis XVIII. The Laplace transform is a very useful tool in solving differential equations and much further, it plays an important role in dealing with linear time-invariant systems.
A.1 Definition of the Laplace Transform
The (unilateral or one-sided) Laplace transform is defined for a function x(t)ofa real variable t (often meaning the time) as