FOURIER - THE WARRIOR

Hi Biomeds!

Hope you all are doing good :)

Today I am going to narrate you all a nice story . 

Can you guess from the title ? Fourier - The Warrior😂

Each and Every Engineering students must have come across the term "FOURIER" at least once in their studies.  Does anyone thought "What is Fourier ? and Why we are studying these kind of stuff ? and How they gonna help us ?"

Lemme' tell you. When I was studying engineering I hate few words like assignment, transforms, output, record etc. etc.....  FOURIER is one such word. Whenever my professors pronounce the word "FOURIER" immediately, my mind voice be like " aaahhh haaa vanthutanyaaaa" 😅 (famous Tamil comedy dialogue). I never took interest over it and finally the outcome was as expected (ZERO). But , somehow I cleared that paper. 

Many of us know, Fate is more stronger than we think. You know what happened ? . Now, I am working as an Assistant Professor , pronouncing the same word Fourier in front of students like me😑.

After this incident, I took one resolution. At least by now, let me learn about Fourier. Once I decided and start learning about Fourier, I came to know "What a man he is?" and What a wonder he made?"

Yass, I am talking about Mr. Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier , who made an initiative for the origin of Fourier series. Mr. Joseph presented his work about "Heat flow" in 1862, which explains not only the heat flow in solid material but it also forms a strong base for the term "Fourier series". 

Fourier thought that any signal (it may be rectangular, triangular, pulse etc.) can be represented by using series of sine waves with different amplitude. This concept is called Fourier series.

Even though, Lagrange and Laplace are not satisfied with this theory, we can say it is a remarkable finding with some restrictions. In simple terms, Fourier proposed a method to scan any signal to produce the components of sine signals and he created ways to construct any periodic signal by adding sine and cosine waves in different amplitude. 

Research has been done over this concept and as a result, they concluded that Fourier series is only applicable for periodic signals. Now, you may have a new question in your mind. 

If we have an aperiodic signal what we have to do ?   The answer to this question leads to new concept called "FOURIER TRANSFORM" 

Fourier transform is the first concept in frequency domain analysis of signals. When we apply Fourier transform to signals, we will get the frequency components of that signal. To be simple, If a signal has multiple frequencies, Fourier transform will find out and explain what are the frequency range available in that particular signal. 

Even now I wonder how the magic is happening with "FOURIER" . Once I found all this , I come to know the real meaning and importance of Fourier. Then I took a resolution that I should bring all this information to my students, so that at least hereafter they may not think Fourier as an enemy as I thought in my college days. 

You may wonder " How the concept of Fourier is useful in Biomedical applications?"

Fourier series or transform play a major role in biomedical signal processing and image processing domains. The concept of Fourier series is applied to ECG signal, where a signal can be represented in terms of a sine wave. Fourier transform is applied to image processing in order to find out the frequency domain. 

Let me know how is the story about Fourier in the comments. 

Thank You.