"chung" wrote in message
...
Mike Gilmour wrote:
"chung" wrote in message
...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/internatio...738394,00.html

Excerpts:

"A £500,000 prize that is considered the "Nobel" for mathematics has gone
to an 80-year-old Swedish academic whose work on the complexities of
soundwaves has subsequently been used in the electronic components of
iPods."

"Prof Carleson's major contributions have come in two fields - the first
has subsequently been used in the components of sound systems and the
second helps to predict how markets and weather systems respond to
change."

"In the 1960s Carleson showed that any sound, no matter how complicated,
can be represented as a series of sine waves. "du Sautoy. "The sound of a
lion roaring can be broken down into just simple tuning forks.""





Looks like Fourier Analysis to me. Tuning forks for sine waves..(jumpers
for goalposts?).maybe Marcus du Sautoy (nice name) is using tuning forks
as dumbing down the tabloids.
"That translates in the real world as the idea that any sound can be
reproduced using the sound of a tuning fork," Really? One tuning fork,
that's amazing ;-)


Perhaps you want to read more about Carleson's work:

http://www.abelprisen.no/en/prisvinn.../building.html

"In 1966 Carleson published a paper that explained why. All finite
graphs of the general type considered by mathematicians could be
captured by adding up the heights of sine waves of appropriate
frequencies. The proof was tough and involved showing why, when you add
up the infinitely many numbers that came out of Fourier's analysis, the
answer didn't spiral off to infinity but honed in on the graph you were
trying to capture. The ideas in the proof were so tough that it is only
in recent decades that mathematicians have appreciated how influential
these ideas really are. Fourier's problem however is still open for
higher dimensional graphs and represents a major goal for mathematicians
in this area."

You can read a little bit more he

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennart_Carleson

rest snipped


Thats better, thanks. The Guardian was poor journalism, the clip above would
have served it a lot better, the Guardian dumbed it down, hence the header
"Prize for mathematician who paved the way for Ipod" I'm not denigrating
his work only remarking on this particular type of tabloid journalism.

Mike





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