MATH 357 - Harmonic Analysis

FC NSMA QFR

4 credits
The class explores the influence of music on the development of mathematics, specifically the sub-discipline of analysis. From Pythagoras’s tuning problem, an early evidence for the existence of irrational numbers, to finding precise descriptions for pitch and musical timbre, questions from music inspired important developments in mathematics, giving rise to the flourishing subfield known as harmonic analysis. By exploring the influence of music on mathematics, the class will provide an introduction to harmonic analysis, reaching from classical results on the convergence of Fourier series to the theory of the Fourier transform and distributions, and their applications to acoustics.
Prerequisites & Notes: MATH 301