Introduction

Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier’s powerful idea of decomposition of a signal into sinusoidal components has found application in almost every engineering and science field. An incomplete list includes acoustics [1497], array imaging [1304], audio [1290], biology [826], biomedical engineering [1109], chemistry [438, 925], chromatography [1481], communications engineering [968], control theory [764], crystallography [316, 498, 499, 716], electromagnetics [250], imaging [151], image processing [1239] including segmentation [1448], nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) [436, 1009], optics [492, 514, 517, 1344], polymer characterization [647], physics [262], radar [154, 1510], remote sensing [84], signal processing [41, 154], structural analysis [384], spectroscopy [84, 267, 724, 1220, 1293, 1481, 1496], time series [124], velocity measurement [1448], tomography [93, 1241, 1242, 1327, 1330, 1325, 1331], weather analysis [456], and X-ray diffraction [1378], Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier’s last name has become an adjective in the terms like Fourier series [395], Fourier transform [41, 51, 149, 154, 160, 437, 447, 926, 968, 1009, 1496], Fourier analysis [151, 379, 606, 796, 1472, 1591], Fourier theory [1485], the Fourier integral [395, 187, 1399], Fourier inversion [1325], Fourier descriptors [826], Fourier coefficients [134], Fourier spectra [624, 625] Fourier reconstruction [1330], Fourier spectrometry [84, 355], Fourier spectroscopy [1220, 1293, 1438], Fourier array imaging [1304], Fourier transform nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) [429, 1004], Fourier vision [1448], Fourier optics [419, 517, 1343], and Fourier acoustics [1496]. Applied Fourier analysis is ubiquitous simply because of the utility of its descriptive power. It is second only to the differential equation in the modelling of physical phenomena. In contrast with other linear transforms, the Fourier transform has a number of physical manifestations. Here is a short list of everyday occurrences as seen through the lens of the Fourier paradigm. • Diffracting coherent waves in sonar and optics in the far field are given by the two dimensional Fourier transform of the diffracting aperture. Remarkably, in free space, the physics of spreading light naturally forms a two dimensional Fourier transform. • The sampling theorem, born of Fourier analysis, tells us how fast to sample an audio waveform to make a discrete time CD or an image to make a DVD.