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.Amid the chaos of revolutionary France, one man’s mathematical obsession gave way to a calculation that now underpins much of #mathematics and #physics.The calculation, called the #Fourier transform, decomposes any #function into its parts.https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-is-the-fourier-transform-20250903/