[aos]

Tomo, if I remember well, Newton was the one who invented differential/integral calculus, or at least contributed tons to it. Without that there wouldn't be much else... including Fourier's stuff.

 

[jonpile]

I've heard Newton referred to as "the greatest human intellect of all time" by at least two scientists I respect a lot...and he is the guy who said: "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.". And yes, he did invent the calculus - as a tool to solve a physics problem IIRC - among lots of other things. The Principia is interesting reading, though some editions are a bit hard to interpret.

For instance, "inversely as the square root of" is in the original version rendered as "reciprocally in the subduplicate ratio of".

This thread has truly illustrated this point - everything everyone does is dependent on everyone who came before him/her - hence the one-upmanship we see here.

My personal favourite innovator has always been Archimedes. A quirky guy whose discoveries and inventions were put to immediate, and stupendously succesful, use.

-jP

 

[Tomo]

Hey,

Fourier's concept has very little to do with calculus. What is awesome is that any function can be "parametrized" by some basis consisting of Cosines and Sines. This allows us to deal with much bigger set of functions. Also, some impossible mathematical processes in normal space can be possible in Fourier space.

I guess Fourier's important to me 'cause his works' important to my work which is closely related to signals and a lot of math to go with it. (Correction: Ugly math!)

I think I am very subjective about Newton. He was a great scientist but a bad aristocrat. He used his science to somewhat questionable means to give himself political power. He became more of a politician than a scientist. And, you know how we, Japanese people, respect politicians. ...

Einstein is also a great scientist. The theory of relativity was only tiniest one of his work. His greatest work is about the properties of light. Light is particle yet wave, wave yet particle. Light is neither particle nor wave. Brah Brah Brah ... Yari Yari Yari ... You can read about them.

Random walker,

Tomo

 

[kwkarth]

You guys are bringing tears to my eyes!! I'm really enjoying reading this thread, y'all talking about the heros of our field!!

Say, we just anounced a breakthrough the other day. [size=xx-small]Can I brag on my company a bit?[/size]

We gotta keep Moore's law goin ya know!! Have you guys heard our announcement about the new xistor structure & materials?

The "TeraHertz" technology will truly allow terahz switching speeds. I know talk of switching speeds may not warm the cockels of the heart of an analog man but our new depleted substrate gate design and high gate dielectric is pretty cool stuff! (No pun intended

)

This new technology will allow us to increase transistor count 25x from today's current P4 designs with 10x speed improvement and no increase in current consumption. Pretty remarkable!

Cheers!!

 

[Daniel Pumphrey]

There are innovators alive and inventing right now. History will decide what is important and usually gets it wrong, but I am impressed with lots of things Today.
I remember that someone at GE invented the transistor and GE thought it was pretty useless. The Japanese saw the possibilities and GE let them have it. Look what happened.
The computers we have now are awesome to me. I don't really know who to thank, but am truely impressed with the state of things.
I know the old innovators are important but I guarantee that there are things now or right around the bend which will be considered equally important to future generations. I just don't know where we are headed. Possibly to photonics to replace electronics, or something even further out there "Organics". The human brain is an electronic system that is a self healing organic structure capable of computing and storage of vast amounts of data while constantly running vast programs on many levels.
Dan

 

[Videoshielded]

Some people in this thread are lucky that the Headwize forums are gone. Otherwize, all the newbies would be able to see the old posts where some people (ahem) were having real trouble getting their first solid state amps to work. Things have come a long way since then.

Sometimes, you gotta kiss a lot of frogs to make the handsome prince. There are no stupid questions, only stupid (or stupidly-given) answers. I always like to think about the number of people righteous guys like Voltsecond over on Bottlehead has started out on the path to glorious DIY sound. You guys have done the same.

 

[jonpile]

Quote:

Originally posted by Videoshielded Some people in this thread are lucky that the Headwize forums are gone. (mangé) Sometimes, you gotta kiss a lot of frogs to make the handsome prince. There are no stupid questions, only stupid (or stupidly-given) answers.

I agree with the basic thrust of your post - well said.

BUT, what makes you say that the Headwize forums are gone? I'd say they're thriving!

-jP