Preface

Summary

… accumulations of isolated facts and measurements which lie as a sort of dead weight on the scientific stomach, and which must remain undigested until theory supplies a more powerful solvent.…

Lord Rayleigh

The theory of electrical networks became fully launched, it seems fair to say, when Gustav Kirchhoff published his voltage and current laws in 1847 [72]. Since then, a massive literature on electrical networks has accumulated, but almost all of it is devoted to finite networks. Infinite networks received scant attention, and what they did receive was devoted primarily to ladders, grids, and other infinite networks having periodic graphs and uniform element values. Only during the past two decades has a general theory for infinite electrical networks with unrestricted graphs and variable element values been developing. The simpler case of purely resistive networks possesses the larger body of results. Nonetheless, much has also been achieved with regard to RLC networks. Enough now exists in the research literature to warrant a book that gathers the salient features of the subject into a coherent exposition.

As might well be expected, the jump in complexity from finite electrical networks to infinite ones is comparable to the jump in complexity from finite-dimensional spaces to infinite-dimensional spaces. Many of the questions we conventionally ask and answer about finite networks are unanswerable for infinite networks – at least at the present time.