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This post doesn’t bring anything new, it’s just pure educational stuff. I only posted it because it took me back to my university days, studying analog and digital signals. Definitely don’t miss that at all! 🤠

Amid the chaos of revolutionary France, one man’s mathematical obsession gave way to a calculation that now underpins much of mathematics and physics. The calculation, called the Fourier transform, decomposes any function into its parts.
As we listen to a piece of music, our ears perform a calculation. The high-pitched flutter of the flute, the middle tones of the violin, and the low hum of the double bass fill the air with pressure waves of many different frequencies. When the combined sound wave descends through the ear canal and into the spiral-shaped cochlea, hairs of different lengths resonate to the different pitches, separating the messy signal into buckets of elemental sounds.
It took mathematicians until the 19th century to master this same calculation.
In the early 1800s, the French mathematician Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier discovered a way to take any function and decompose it into a set of fundamental waves, or frequencies. Add these constituent frequencies back together, and you’ll get your original function. The technique, today called the Fourier transform, allowed the mathematician — previously an ardent proponent of the French revolution — to spur a mathematical revolution as well.
111 sats \ 0 replies \ @jakoyoh629 7h
Definitely don’t miss that at all! 🤠
I feel you, man. Some of the stuff we learned in school was just that, school stuff. You never touch it again outside of that, and honestly, thank God for that! Haha.
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When I see the type of content these days explaining abstract stuff very intuitively, i realize i was born a decade or two too early (for other reasons, I'm happy to have been born at the time I was). The Fourier transform content on 3Blue1Brown's channel is amazing for instance. Or maybe i just wasn't interested enough at the time to look for it. Anyhow, i know where to look when time comes for my son.
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You're right. I can't really complain, my teacher was great at explaining stuff, especially with those drawings that made everything clear.
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