As we listen to a piece of music, our ears perform a calculation. The high-pitched flutter of the flute, the middle tones of the violin, and the low hum of the double bass fill the air with pressure waves of many different frequencies.
When the combined sound wave descends through the ear canal and into the spiral-shaped cochlea, hairs of different lengths resonate to the different pitches, separating the messy signal into buckets of elemental sounds.
It took mathematicians until the 19th century to master this same calculation.
In the early 1800s, the French mathematician Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier discovered a way to take any function and decompose it into a set of fundamental waves, or frequencies. Add these constituent frequencies back together, and you’ll get your original function. The technique, today called the Fourier transform, allowed the mathematician — previously an ardent proponent of the French revolution — to spur a mathematical revolution as well.
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