Some pioneers of the applications of fractional calculus

Abstract

In the last decades fractional calculus (FC) became an area of intensive research and development. This paper goes back and recalls important pioneers that started to apply FC to scientific and engineering problems during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Those we present are, in alphabetical order: Niels Abel, Kenneth and Robert Cole, Andrew Gemant, Andrey N. Gerasimov, Oliver Heaviside, Paul Lévy, Rashid Sh. Nigmatullin, Yuri N. Rabotnov, George Scott Blair. © 2014 Versita Warsaw and Springer-Verlag Wien. MSC 2010: Primary 26A33 Secondary 01A55, 01A60, 34A08.