Post by (@cmglee) on Sat, 11 Jul 20 19:34:03 +0000 View Full Post Many years ago, I learnt that waves can be made out of many sine waves in what's called a Fourier series. Sure, there are many animations visualising the process, but one that particularly stuck was having circles rotating at the ends of other circles. I made four GIF animations of them http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Fourier_series_circles_animation before I recently figured out how to make them in SVG using cascading style sheets. The first is the classic example of a square wave, which shows the process best: A triangular wave, on the other hand, converges too quickly: Also interesting is a sawtooth wave, as it is asymmetrical: To contrast with the sawtooth wave, here's part of a cubic (y = x³), normalised to have the same values as the above: Maths is certainly easier when you can see it in a diagram!
