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But what is a Fourier series? From heat flow to drawing with circles | DE4

3Blue1Brown4 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2020–2025
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explainer · intro · evergreen · 2020–2025 on HN

3Blue1Brown introduces Fourier series, from the heat equation to drawing arbitrary shapes with rotating circles. It builds a visual intuition for decomposing functions into sine waves.

Recommended as the visual explanation that makes Fourier series and transforms click, even for laypeople.

8 comments from Hacker News

@bldavies2023-12 · in “Old blog of Matt Henderson, beautiful math animations”

3B1B is incredible. I loved his video ( ▶ this video ) using Fourier series to make epicycle animations. I worked through the details to make my own: link

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@kcoul2020-06 · in “A ‘Useless’ Perspective That Transformed Mathematics”

I wouldn’t call this 3blue1brown video a reference, but until I watched this (coming from an audio background), I didn’t quite grasp that a continuous stencil of any complex silhouette could be described in terms of a set of contributing vectors. Helped click that there is a perfect visual analogy to the deconstruction of complex audio to sine waves. ▶ this video

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@tene2021-10 · in “Is the great neutrino puzzle pointing to multiple missing particles?”

You can use epicycles to draw the actual orbits of planets. That's what "epicycles" are, or were: a fairly accurate model of the observed orbits of planets relative to Earth built through a composition of circular motions. One way to think about it is that you start by modeling the motion as a simple circular orbit. You then look at how the observed data differs from your circular model and add an epicycle whose parameters minimize the difference between your new model and your observations. Repeat this process until you get as close as you want to get. The success of heliocentric elliptic-orbit model isn't that it's able to represent something impossible with epicycles, but that it's dramatically simpler. Kepler's three laws are: 1) The orbit of a planet is an ellipse with the Sun at one of the two foci. 2) A line segment joining a planet and the Sun sweeps out equal areas during equal intervals of time. 3) The square of a planet's orbital period is proportional to the cube of the length of the semi-major axis of its orbit. In contrast, the epicycle models had 40-80 cycles with parameters tuned to match the observed data. I really like this video on how Fourier series work: ▶ this video

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@maze-le2020-11 · in “Why Is Scientific Illiteracy So Acceptable?”

> It remains a badge of honor for many who like to describe themselves as highly cultured or artistic to describe themselves as mathematically challenged, or to say that their brains aren’t wired for mathematics. Because many of those they hold in high esteem have made similar claims, there is no real social penalty to them for doing so. For many scientific illiteracy is in the same category as mathematical illiteracy -- but the problem starts there already. Everybody should at least know what a Fourier transformation does -- it's not necessary to exercise it rigorously, but at least an idea... I think this video is enough to give even laymans an idea: ▶ this video

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@vismit20002025-04 · in “Animals Made from 13 Circles (2016)”

Reminds of 'Drawing with circles' in 3b1b classic on Fourier series: ▶ this video So if we remove the condition of 13, everything is in fact made of circles only!