What did joseph fourier discover
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Today, Joseph Fourier. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.
The eighteenth century radiated a peculiar kind of genius. It gave us people like Mozart, Jefferson, Euler, and Ben Franklin. Isaac Newton led us into the astonishing eighteenth century. And Joseph Fourier might well have been the last of those greats.
If you've studied math, heat flow, or acoustics, you've heard of Fourier. He was born in France in 1768. Orphaned at nine, he never-theless gained an education in math and military engineering. Then he walked a slippery path through the politics of the French Revolution. He was jailed twice along the way.
As the dust cleared, Fourier joined the faculty of France's new École Polytechnique for two-and-a-half years. He was then drafted into foreign service and sent off on a ship to a secret posting with Napoleon Bonaparte. It turned out he was to be part of Napoleon's Egypt campaign -- the Secretary of a so-called Cairo Institute, charged with a
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Joseph Fourier facts for kids
Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier (; French: [fuʁje]; 21 March 1768 – 16 May 1830) was a Frenchmathematician and physicist born in Auxerre and best known for initiating the investigation of Fourier series, which eventually developed into Fourier analysis and harmonic analysis, and their applications to problems of heat transfer and vibrations. The Fourier transform and Fourier's law of conduction are also named in his honour. Fourier is also generally credited with the discovery of the greenhouse effect.
Biography
Fourier was born at Auxerre (now in the Yonnedépartement of France), the son of a tailor. He was orphaned at the age of nine. Fourier was recommended to the Bishop of Auxerre and, through this introduction, he was educated by the Benedictine Order of the Convent of St. Mark. The commissions in the scientific corps of the army were reserved for those of good birth, and being thus ineligible, he accepted a military lectureship on mathematics. He took a prominent part in his own district in promoting the French Revolution, serving on the loca
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Biography of Fourier
The following is from The Fourier Transform and Its Application, by Ronald N. Bracewell, McGraw-Hill, 1986,pp 462-464.
Baron Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Fourier (March 21 1768-May 16, 1830), born in poor circumstances in Auxerre, introduced the idea that an arbitrary function, even one defined by different analytic expressions in adjacent segments of its range (such as a staircase waveform), could nevertheless be represented by a single analytic expression. This idea encountered resistance at the time I but has proved to be central to many later developments in mathematics science, and engineering. It is at the heart of the electrical engineering curriculum today. Fourier came upon his idea in connection with the problem of the flow of heat in solid bodies, including the earth.
The formula
x/2 = sin x - (sin 2x)/2 + (sin 3x)/3 + · · ·
was published by Leonhard Euler (1707-1783) before Fourier’s work began, so you might like to ponder the question why Euler did not receive the credit for Fourier’s series.
Fourier was o
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