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Showing posts from August, 2016

For the love of Spherical Harmonics

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I hate starting every blog post with an apology as I have been busy, but I have. But I have. Teaching  Electromagnetism  to our first year class, computational physics using  MatLab , and six smart  talented students  to wrangle, takes up a lot of time. But I continue to try and learn a new thing every day! And so here's a short summary of what I've been doing recently. There's no secret I love maths. I'm not skilled enough to be a mathematician, but I am an avid user. One of the things I love about maths is its shock value. What, I hear you say, shock? Yes, shock. I remember when I discovered that  trigonometric functions  can be written as infinite series, and finding you can calculate these series numerically on a computer by adding the terms together, getting more and more accurate as we add higher terms. And then there is  Fourier Series ! The fact that you can add these trigonometric functions together, appropriately weighted, to make other functions, fun