Bonjour mes amis!Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier (I think really important people have really long names. It deals with high-brow society, etc) was a French (Vive la France!) mathematician who was pretty much awesome. He was a true "philosopher" in its strictest sense - those who actually observed nature, society, and order to learn more about the world. Plus, he was really, really, really good at what he did.
Anyways, you may be presently wondering why I'm talking about an influential dead guy. Well, the answer lies in the handy Fourier Transform.
Within Electrical Engineering, there are multiple fields: power, controls, robotics, electronics, communications and network systems, and digital signal processing. Due to my love of music and waves in general, I've opted towards the DSP route and am starting research next semester in speech processing.
As a DSP engineer, one of our primary concerns is system analysis - especially dealing with analog/digital (and digital/analog) conversions, filters, and noise cancellations. To make these calculations easier, one often has to transform the system from the time domain to the frequency domain.
Anyways, long story short: I was doing a few problems for one of my summer classes that involves a couple Fourier transforms. I am pretty rusty on a few of the rules, so I visited Wikipedia for some help. I laughed really hard when I saw this:
All this does nothing but inspire me to make a list of awesome Electrical Engineers (or those who greatly contributed towards the field). So far:
- Oliver Heaviside
- Nikola Tesla (Screw you, Edison!)
- James Maxwell
- André-Marie Ampère
- Gregor Ohm
- Alessandro Volta
- Obviously, Fourier
Boy, that was nerdy.
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I was sitting in on one of the camp classes this week, taught by one of my favorite professors. He was talking about Platonic virtue (they had read the Meno), and he had highlighted the importance of knowledge for excellence, i.e. in order to be a good doctor, one must have knowledge of the body and of medicine; in order to be a good car mechanic, one must have knowledge of how cars work, etc.
A little later in the lecture, Wikipedia came up somehow, and he goes, "Do you remember earlier when we were talking about how knowledge is necessary for excellence, and we agreed that, oh, things like amateur brain surgery and amateur piloting were bad ideas? How about this one: amateur encyclopedia writing? Who here thinks that sounds like a really brilliant idea?"
Obviously, I use Wikipedia constantly, but it was a hilarious moment.
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