January 8, 2026
Fourier? More like Four-yeah!
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of the Fourier Transform
Math magic or ancient cheat code? Internet fights over Fourier
TLDR: Joshua Wise shared a talk and resources on the Fourier Transform, the math behind modern signals. Comments exploded into awe vs. memes, with a history tussle over whether Gauss beat the 1965 speed-up and practical bragging about reading heartbeats from webcams—proof this math quietly runs our world.
Joshua Wise dropped a treasure chest of goodies from his Teardown 2025 talk—slides, a code notebook, and a full YouTube video—and the crowd immediately split into camps. One camp thinks the Fourier Transform (a way to turn messy signals into their “musical notes” of frequency) is pure sorcery powering TV, streaming, and Wi‑Fi. Another camp? Loudly unimpressed, cracking memes and swatting away the hype. The strongest vibe: equal parts awe and eye-roll.
The drama heats up when history nerds arrive. User derektank drops a bomb: did Carl Friedrich Gauss beat the famous 1965 Fast Fourier Transform paper by a century? Cue a credits war over who really invented the speed hack. Meanwhile, practical folks flex: hedgehog claims you can read a person’s heart rate from a webcam by tracking tiny color pulses at a steady frequency—hello, DIY lie detector energy. And rcarmo pushes a friendly explainer with Sebastian Lague’s video, while emil-lp jokes about the “unreasonable effectiveness” of dramatic titles.
Wise’s resource list even nods to OFDM (a channel-splitting trick for broadcasting) and his own DVB‑T decoder. The comment section turned into a math fan club, a meme factory, and a courtroom—proving that nothing divides the internet like a very effective equation.
Key Points
- •A recording of Joshua Wise’s Teardown 2025 talk on the Fourier Transform is now available on YouTube.
- •The post provides a PDF of the slides and a Jupyter notebook used to produce the talk’s plots.
- •It cites the original OFDM patent (US3488445A), filed in 1966 and expired in 1987.
- •Wise links an IEEE paper on simultaneous estimation of carrier frequency offset and time offset, noting he implemented the algorithm.
- •He shares a GitHub repository for a DVB‑T decoder and a recommended video explaining FFT implementation.