From Image Compression to CAT Scans

Writing for the Guardian, Alok Jha offers an ode to the usefulness and ubiquity of the Fourier transform.

"It pops up wherever scientists need to study complex things that fluctuate in the real world," Jha writes, and then explains how the transform allows any complex wave-like signal to be broken down into a sum of sine waves.

Jha agrees with a sentiment expressed by Lord Kelvin in 1867:

Fourier's theorem is not only one of the most beautiful results of modern analysis, but it may be said to furnish an indispensable instrument in the treatment of nearly every recondite question in modern physics.