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This 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 engine
by ekun 9y ago
This 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.