Viewing the fourier decomposition visualized

[Phil Graham]

All,

I stumbled across this today, and I thought it is a nice visual representation of what Fourier was driving at. Hopefully it can be an "AHA" for people for people who are trying to understand these concepts:

The smooth motion of rotating circles can be used... - Maths and Science blog- matthen

 

[Tim McCulloch]

Re: Viewing the fourier decomposition visualized

Very cool, Phil. Thanks for the visual link.

 

[Adam Black]

Re: Viewing the fourier decomposition visualized

Very cool!

 

[Mark DeArman]

Re: Viewing the fourier decomposition visualized

The Wolfram site had a few other fun ones I found a while back:
Wolfram Demonstrations Project
Wolfram Demonstrations Project

The site is actually a lot of fun, there are lots of demos on there. They also sell a personal copy of Mathematica now for 200$ I think.

 

[Peter Kowalczyk]

Re: Viewing the fourier decomposition visualized

Nice visualization. I've seen something like this to explain the relationship between trig functions, sinusoids in time, and complex exponentials, but never seen it illustrate fourier synthesis of n harmonics. It would be cool if it were interactive, allowing one to specify relative magnitude and phase angle of the 'harmonics' (Looks like the Wolfram demo linked above gets into that a bit...)

 

[Peter Morris]

Re: Viewing the fourier decomposition visualized

All,

I stumbled across this today, and I thought it is a nice visual representation of what Fourier was driving at. Hopefully it can be an "AHA" for people for people who are trying to understand these concepts:

The smooth motion of rotating circles can be used... - Maths and Science blog- matthen

and this one (in case you didn't see it) Ptolemy and Homer (Simpson) - YouTube