"[O]ne can hardly imagine someone with a broader background than Fourier, more uniquely situated to simultaneously tackle problems of pure thought as well as in the physical world around him, perhaps in the same stroke of the pen. In the introduction of The Analytical Theory of Heat, he made no secret about the fact that he intended to do just that, with mathematics as his language and tool."
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Kenneth M. Monks, "Fourier’s Heat Equation and the Birth of Fourier Series" (2022) Digital Commons @.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Analytic_Theory_of_Heat
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The Analytic Theory of Heat
The Analytic Theory of Heat (1878) is a translation by Alexander Freeman, M.A., with notes, of Joseph Fourier's Théorie Analytique de la Chaleur (1822). Fourier based his reasoning on : the flow of heat between two adjacent molecules is proportional to the extremely small difference of their temperatures. In this work Fourier claims that any function of a variable, can be expanded in a series of sines of multiples of the variable. Though not correct without additional conditions, Fourier's obser
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