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. "That translates in the
real world as the idea that any sound can be reproduced using the sound
of a tuning fork," said a University of Oxford mathematician, Marcus du
Sautoy. "The sound of a lion roaring can be broken down into just simple
tuning forks.""

"In an iPod, tunes stored electronically as complex waves are split into
their different components when played."

"For years people didn't understand the complexities of it," said Prof
du Sautoy. "In recent years they've realised how amazing Carleson's work
was."

Hopefully, this explains why frequency response measurements, and
testing with test tones, are so important in audio.


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