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The Fourier Transform, explained in one sentence (2014)

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121–130 of 171 posts

Re: The Fourier Transform, explained in one sentence (2014)

#121

Does "blog post learning" ever really work? I have taught these kind of undergraduate subjects and, in the context of a course , the Fourier transform never struck me as something very complicated. First, it feels completely natural to write down a Fourier decomposition for periodic functions; the inverse transform to determine the coefficient is just (real or complex) calculus; and all that is left is to convince th…

I feel like I've learned some things from high quality interactive blog posts. These posts from Bartosz Ciechanowski come to mind https://ciechanow.ski/archives/

Re: The Fourier Transform, explained in one sentence (2014)

#122

Does "blog post learning" ever really work? I have taught these kind of undergraduate subjects and, in the context of a course , the Fourier transform never struck me as something very complicated. First, it feels completely natural to write down a Fourier decomposition for periodic functions; the inverse transform to determine the coefficient is just (real or complex) calculus; and all that is left is to convince th…

There's a lot of math & physics subjects that I formally learned and passed exams at Uni, but frankly never really fully understood them. I've found clarifications on many of these subjects later on web, in exactly these types of blogs or youtube videos. All you need is one or two core concepts better explained and suddenly you can connect all the dots, and that what this type of content is fantastic for.

Re: The Fourier Transform, explained in one sentence (2014)

#126
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you lose something, you always find it in the last place you search... because why would you keep searching after you found it

It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that it was a joke when people said "It's always the last place you look." Like well into my teens. But ever since I figured it out, I always look at least one more place after finding something.

Well, at least you were a teen when you realized it. In my case it was 1min ago in this very HN thread...

I always assumed it was kind of a 'life's a bitch' aphorism

Re: The Fourier Transform, explained in one sentence (2014)

#127
post #124

As someone without a lot of math background, the most confusing part of this is k. Is k a number, like 7.45 or whatever? Or something else? Everything else is just normal mathy stuff.

k is the parameter of the function as in the 'x'-axis so instead of saying y=f(x), the formula says y=f(k)

You can see in the formula, that it's plugged in as the frequency of the signal the original signal is 'spun-around' with.

Re: The Fourier Transform, explained in one sentence (2014)

#128
I love the color coded approach for this, but to problems for me:

1. I can't tell the difference between the pink and the purple in the formula. The text is fine, but the formula isn't. 2. I have no idea what "signal" means in the "spin your signal" so the single sentence explanation is completely useless to me.

This bums me out a bit because I think there's something really great here.

Re: The Fourier Transform, explained in one sentence (2014)

#129
post #40

I'm found of seeing the Fourier transform as a fancy way of changing basis / coordinates, not sure how mathematically correct is that. In high school physics some problems got way easier by redefining coordinates as x' and y', solving for those, them going back to x and y. That's what the Fourier transform does, but for functions. Looking at its formula, we can see it looks like we are projecting a function into a se…

As others note, it's exactly a change in basis. In particular, it's an orthonormal basis, meaning that the dot product (correlation) between a basis function and itself is one, and between any two different basis functions is zero. This gives some intuition for why the forward and inverse transforms look so similar, in the same way that the inverse of an orthonormal matrix (like a rotation matrix) is just its transpose.

Re: The Fourier Transform, explained in one sentence (2014)

#130

Does "blog post learning" ever really work? I have taught these kind of undergraduate subjects and, in the context of a course , the Fourier transform never struck me as something very complicated. First, it feels completely natural to write down a Fourier decomposition for periodic functions; the inverse transform to determine the coefficient is just (real or complex) calculus; and all that is left is to convince th…

I do think "blog post learning" can work, but agree with you that this ain't it. The "explanation" on the blog post would really only work for someone who more-or-less understood Fourier Series already.

You're also right that explanations can't be isolated. I'd go further and say they never are. People only come to understand new things in terms of things they already understand. There's no "explaining X" in isolation, there's only "explaining X in terms of Y." A good explanation either supplies a suitable Y or makes it clear to the reader what Y they'll be relying on.

So, even if the author tries to isolate, a successful explanation always relies on collateral information. The only question is whether that collateral information is left to chance or intentionally exploited.

What's the "Y" here? Well, the author assumes the reader can make sense of phrases like "energy at a frequency", what it means to "spin your frequency around a circle", "average a bunch of points along a path", etc.

That's...a lot. I'd go so far as to say that a reader who can make sense of that probably already understands more fundamental concepts like vector spaces, bases, and Taylor Series.

And if they understand those things then there are much more straightforward explanations available!

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