Visualizing Fourier Series

Posted by Jiro Doke, March 18, 2016

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Jiro's pick this week is Harmonic Circles Animation by Mehmet E. Yavuz.

Continuing on from my previous post, Bouncing Ball Animation, here's another great example of using animation to illustrate mathematical concepts. In this example by Mehmet, a Fourier series is illustrated using circles. The first animation shows the first few terms individually, and the second animation shows the sum of the terms.

I have one suggestion for improvement in his code. In order to create the animation, Mehmet re-plots the graphics inside a for-loop. A more efficient, and recommended, way is to plot once and only update the X and Y data of the graphics objects inside the loop.

Comments

How do you use animations to convey ideas? Let us know what you think here or leave a comment for Mehmet.

Published with MATLAB® R2016a