
A Hard Day's Night: Solving a Beatles Mystery with Mathematics - empressplay
http://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2017-11-05/a-hard-days-night-how-mathematics-revealed-beatles-secret/9093348
======
ekun
This article has to be garbage if a math professor hadn't heard of Fourier
transforms until reading a book about sound and math. Maybe I'm coming from an
engineering background but it's a very basic concept that I learned to use to
break down sound in a general freshman year engineering class.

~~~
whatshisface
The Fourier transform can be introduced at vastly different levels of
sophistication - engineers see it freshman year, physics programs usually wait
until they've derived the wave equation, and if you're a math professor whose
goal is to invent _novel math_ , it's probably not even worth knowing unless
you are going to spend years and years on it.

~~~
yorwba
I don't think it's possible to complete a maths program without spending some
time with Fourier series in the context of vector spaces of functions,
convergence of series of functions, linear operators and so on. However, I can
very much imagine that applications, e.g. to sound processing, are not
particularly emphasized; so it might have taken that book for the professor to
make the right connection.

------
dang
2008:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=347231](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=347231).

Pretty sure there have been other HN threads about this too...

Edit: 2014:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8749450](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8749450)

------
peterburkimsher
The article talks about how the chord was a mystery and the ways people tried
to find it... but it doesn't tell us what the chord is!

I now know there's an F on a piano that's one part of it, but what about the
other guitar parts?

~~~
kmill
[http://www.mscs.dal.ca/~brown/n-oct04-harddayjib.pdf](http://www.mscs.dal.ca/~brown/n-oct04-harddayjib.pdf)

------
TwoBit
I'll be more convinced when they actually produce a recording of this.

