Source on Joseph Fourier
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“He started as a convinced Jacobin... and ended up a cautious liberal.”
“He ranks among the most important scientists of the 19the century for his studies in the propagation of heat... and the paternity of the expression "greenhouse effect"—effet de serre—is attributed to Fourier.”
“The novelty of his method... initially perplexed... mathematicians... from Lagrange to Laplace and Poisson. ...[P]ublication ...was ...delayed as many as fifteen years during which he ...defended, explained and extended [his work].”
“Galileo and Hooke demonstrated that every sound is characterized by a precise number of vibrations per second, but the full understanding of even the simplest... vibrators requires... calculus. ...Leonard Euler, Daniel Bernoulli, Jean le Rond d'Alembert, and Joseph Louis Lagrange all studied the vibrating string.... In 1747 d'Alembert found... the wave equation and in 1753 Bernoulli stated the... decomposition of every motion of a string as a sum of elementary sinusoidal motions. Then at the beginning of the following century Fourier developed "harmonic analysis."”