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A Hard Day's Night: Solving a Beatles Mystery with Mathematics
- peterburkimsher 9y agoThe article talks about how the chord was a mystery and the ways people tried to find it... but it doesn't tell us what the chord is! I now know there's an F on a piano that's one part of it, but what about the other guitar parts?
- kmill 9y agohttp://www.mscs.dal.ca/~brown/n-oct04-harddayjib.pdf http://www.mscs.dal.ca/~brown/n-oct04-harddayjib.pdf
- SyneRyder 9y agoAccording to a prior HN comment by LogicHoleFlaw here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=347486 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=347486 From the paper: George Harrison on 12-string pairs 2 through 5: (A2 A3) (D3 D4) (G3 G4) (C4 C4) George Martin on piano: D3 F3 D5 G5 E6 John Lennon on 6-string: C5 Paul McCartney on his Höfner bass: D3
- dang 9y ago2008: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=347231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=347231. Pretty sure there have been other HN threads about this too... Edit: 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8749450 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8749450
- ekun 9y agoThis article has to be garbage if a math professor hadn't heard of Fourier transforms until reading a book about sound and math. Maybe I'm coming from an engineering background but it's a very basic concept that I learned to use to break down sound in a general freshman year engineering class.
- whatshisface 9y agoThe Fourier transform can be introduced at vastly different levels of sophistication - engineers see it freshman year, physics programs usually wait until they've derived the wave equation, and if you're a math professor whose goal is to invent novel math, it's probably not even worth knowing unless you are going to spend years and years on it.
- yorwba 9y agoI don't think it's possible to complete a maths program without spending some time with Fourier series in the context of vector spaces of functions, convergence of series of functions, linear operators and so on. However, I can very much imagine that applications, e.g. to sound processing, are not particularly emphasized; so it might have taken that book for the professor to make the right connection.
- photojosh 9y agoAt least they didn't "rediscover" Fourier transforms for audio analysis, in the vein of https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discovers-integration-gets-75-citations/ https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-research...
- mannykannot 9y agoIt is probably just the journalist not getting the story quite right. It does not automatically invalidate the salient parts.
- TwoBit 9y agoThis is the correct explanation. The journalist misunderstood something he said to mean he discovered Fourier transforms at that later time.
- TwoBit 9y agoI'll be more convinced when they actually produce a recording of this.