The unreasonable effectiveness of the Fourier transform
joshuawise.com
The unreasonable effectiveness of the Fourier transform
1–10 of 167 posts
Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of the Fourier transform
#2Okay, who's gonna write the story
> The unreasonable effectiveness of The Unreasonable Effectiveness title?
Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of the Fourier transform
#3Okay, who's gonna write the story > The unreasonable effectiveness of The Unreasonable Effectiveness title?
Agreed, these kind of titles are very silly.
FTs are actually very reasonable, in the sense that they are a easy to reason about conceptually and in practice.
There's another title referenced in that link which is equally asinine: "Eugene Wigner's original discussion, "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences". "
Like, wtf?
Mathematics is the language of science, science would not compound or be explainable, communicable, or model-able in code without mathematics.
It's actually both plainly obvious for mathematics then to be extremely effective (which it is) and also be evidently reasonable as to why, ergo it is not unreasonably effective.
Also the slides are just FTs 101 the same material as in any basic course.
Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of the Fourier transform
#4Okay, who's gonna write the story > The unreasonable effectiveness of The Unreasonable Effectiveness title?
Agreed, these kind of titles are very silly. FTs are actually very reasonable, in the sense that they are a easy to reason about conceptually and in practice. There's another title referenced in that link which is equally asinine: "Eugene Wigner's original discussion, "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences". " Like, wtf? Mathematics is the language of science, science would not compoun…
Hi, original presenter here :) The beginning is FTs 101. The end gets more application-centric around OFDM and is why it feels 'unreasonably effective' to me. If it feels obvious, there's a couple of slides at the end that are food for thought jumping off points. And if that's obvious to you too, let's collab on building an open source LTE modem!
Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of the Fourier transform
#5Okay, who's gonna write the story > The unreasonable effectiveness of The Unreasonable Effectiveness title?
Agreed, these kind of titles are very silly. FTs are actually very reasonable, in the sense that they are a easy to reason about conceptually and in practice. There's another title referenced in that link which is equally asinine: "Eugene Wigner's original discussion, "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences". " Like, wtf? Mathematics is the language of science, science would not compoun…
> FTs are actually very reasonable, in the sense that they are a easy to reason about conceptually and in practice.
ok but it's not the FTs that are unreasonable, it's the effectiveness
I think we all understand at this point that "unreasonable effectiveness" just means "surprisingly useful in ways we might not have immediately considered"
Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of the Fourier transform
#6Okay, who's gonna write the story > The unreasonable effectiveness of The Unreasonable Effectiveness title?
It's a play on the famous essay 1960 "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences".
I agree this is getting old after 75 years. Not least because it seems slightly manipulative to disguise a declarative claim ("The Fourier transform is unreasonably effective."), which could be false, as a noun phrase ("The unreasonable effectiveness of the Fourier transform"), which doesn't look like a thing that can be wrong.
Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of the Fourier transform
#7Okay, who's gonna write the story > The unreasonable effectiveness of The Unreasonable Effectiveness title?
How about The unreasonable effectiveness title considered harmful?
Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of the Fourier transform
#8Okay, who's gonna write the story > The unreasonable effectiveness of The Unreasonable Effectiveness title?
Agreed, these kind of titles are very silly. FTs are actually very reasonable, in the sense that they are a easy to reason about conceptually and in practice. There's another title referenced in that link which is equally asinine: "Eugene Wigner's original discussion, "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences". " Like, wtf? Mathematics is the language of science, science would not compoun…
It is pretty funny to flippantly call an influential paper by someone who received a Nobel Prize in Physics 'asinine'.
Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of the Fourier transform
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed, these kind of titles are very silly. FTs are actually very reasonable, in the sense that they are a easy to reason about conceptually and in practice. There's another title referenced in that link which is equally asinine: "Eugene Wigner's original discussion, "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences". " Like, wtf? Mathematics is the language of science, science would not compoun…
> FTs are actually very reasonable, in the sense that they are a easy to reason about conceptually and in practice. ok but it's not the FTs that are unreasonable, it's the effectiveness I think we all understand at this point that "unreasonable effectiveness" just means "surprisingly useful in ways we might not have immediately considered"
The HN audience is filled with the world's densest collection of literalists and nitpickers: software engineers.
Metaphorical language compels them to microrebuttals.
Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of the Fourier transform
#10Okay, who's gonna write the story > The unreasonable effectiveness of The Unreasonable Effectiveness title?
Agreed, these kind of titles are very silly. FTs are actually very reasonable, in the sense that they are a easy to reason about conceptually and in practice. There's another title referenced in that link which is equally asinine: "Eugene Wigner's original discussion, "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences". " Like, wtf? Mathematics is the language of science, science would not compoun…
I find it hard to parse the middle of your post. Are you saying Wigner's article, which is what all the "unreasonable effectiveness" titles reference, is silly?
If that is what you are saying I suggest that you actually go back and read it. Or at least the Wiki article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness...
By means of contrast: I think it's clear that mathematics is, for example, not unreasonably effective in psychology. It's necessary and useful and effective at doing what it does, but not surprisingly so. Yet in the natural sciences it often has been. This is not a statement about mathematics but about the world.
(As Wittgenstein put it some decades earlier: "So too the fact that it can be described by Newtonian mechanics asserts nothing about the world; but this asserts something, namely, that it can be described in that particular way in which as a matter of fact it is described. The fact, too, that it can be described more simply by one system of mechanics than by another says something about the world.")