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I thought the work on the structure of DNA used Fourier analysis more than group theory. I know harmonic analysis in general combines the two, but I'm sure Cri

I thought the work on the structure of DNA used Fourier analysis more than group theory. I know harmonic analysis in general combines the two, but I'm sure Crick and Watson could have done their work without knowing the definition of a group.

adw 8y ago
And by Crick and Watson you mean Crick, Watson, Franklin and Wilkins, right? It's fairly clear all four deserve at least partial authorship by modern standards. James Watson was a piece of work. (https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jun/23/sexism-in-science-did-watson-and-crick-really-steal-rosalind-franklins-data https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jun/23/sexism-in-sc...) Crick was absolutely certainly familiar with the crystallographic space groups; he was the student of Lawrence Bragg (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Bragg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Bragg), who is the youngest ever Nobel laureate in physics – winning it with his father for more or less inventing X-ray crystallography. It's mostly 19th-century mathematics, after all.