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247 points pykello | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.259s | source
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amarant ◴[] No.46188862[source]
I've decided math isn't my thing. The first part of the article I couldn't stop thinking "how the hell would you construct a banana filter?" And the entire smoothie metaphor seemed to describe nothing at all.

Then there was something about circles and why do some people call them some other silly thing?

So far, so utterly meaningless, as far as I could tell. just seemed like meaningless babble to make even a kindergartner feel comfortable with the article, but it didn't seem to have communicated much of anything, really.

Then there were circles. Some of them were moving, one of them had a sinus wave next to it and some balls were tracing both in sync, indicating which part of the sinus wave equalled which part of the circle I guess?

I understood none of it.

I asked chat gpt to explain to me, i think it has read this article cause it used the smoothie analogy as well. I still don't understand what that analogy is meant to mean.

Then finally I found this: If someone plays a piano chord, you hear one sound. But that sound is actually made of multiple notes (multiple frequencies).

The Fourier Transform is the tool that figures out:

which notes (frequencies) are present, and how loud each one is

That, finally, makes sense.

replies(2): >>46191105 #>>46194847 #
dsego ◴[] No.46191105[source]
I wonder if my approach would help with your understanding?

https://dsego.github.io/demystifying-fourier/

replies(1): >>46199163 #
1. amarant ◴[] No.46199163[source]
Yes, I could understand almost all of this actually! Thanks for explaining Fourier so well!

I really don't have any mathematics in my background, so you lost me towards the very end when the actual math came in, but I can't fault your Fourier explanation for not also explaining imaginary numbers: even I can see they're out of scope for this post!