Beautiful! How long did it take to make this blog post?
Oh man, it took me a while. I started in August and have been chipping away at it on the side, until now.
An Interactive Introduction to Fourier Transforms
11–20 of 23 posts
Re: An Interactive Introduction to Fourier Transforms
#12This is incredible.
If I wanted to collect things like this to teach my kids, where do I look? How do we gather amazing resources like this in one spot?
I particularly love that it focuses on one topic and nails it.
Re: An Interactive Introduction to Fourier Transforms
#13This is great as it doesn't just explain the basics, it also shows how they are used in MP3 and JPEG files.
I always had a very vague "throws away data that's not perceived" idea of how MP3 works. With the background from this I was able to really understand the wikipedia page and found this great Ars[0] article from 2007 to cement my understanding.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/features/2007/10/the-audiofile-under...
Re: An Interactive Introduction to Fourier Transforms
#14Really fantastic work. Best interactive write-up I've seen of a technical topic in a long time.
Re: An Interactive Introduction to Fourier Transforms
#15That was the most impressive opening demonstration. My eyes popped out of my skull.
Re: An Interactive Introduction to Fourier Transforms
#16This is incredible. If I wanted to collect things like this to teach my kids, where do I look? How do we gather amazing resources like this in one spot? I particularly love that it focuses on one topic and nails it.
Something that's become quite popular in recent times are "awesome lists"[0, 1]. This isn't the common use-case for them, but it might be worth looking into.
Re: An Interactive Introduction to Fourier Transforms
#17This is really cool. I especially like the rotating circles visualization. Another video that helped me finally "get" Fouriers is the 3Blue1Brown video:
Re: An Interactive Introduction to Fourier Transforms
#18Amazing work! Thank you :)
Re: An Interactive Introduction to Fourier Transforms
#19At the time of writing the Gibbs phenomenon -- the overshoot occurring at discontinuities of a square wave, which does not go away no matter how many harmonics are included (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbs_phenomenon ) -- is not correctly represented in these visualisations, implying that important aspects of the underlying maths are obscured. In my opinion this limits the didactic value of an otherwise impre…
What's not correct in the animations?
(arguably the whole point of a tutorial like this is to do it without the maths)
Re: An Interactive Introduction to Fourier Transforms
#20Very cool.
One idea that would be cool to see is a repeat of the video where the number of ‘harmonics’ is clipped.
Eg, show the video with only the first 5 circle components. Then the first 10, the first 15, and so on.
Will see the drawing approach the final image, and get the idea the low-freq harmonics do the bulk of the work but high-freq ones give the small details to make the hand a hand.