Overview: Since its beginnings with Fourier (and as far back as the Babylonian astron omers), harmonic analysis has been developed with the goal of unraveling the mysteries of the physical world of quasars, brain tumors, and so forth, as well as the mysteries of the nonphysical, but no less concrete, world of prime numbers, diophantine equations, and zeta functions. Quoting Courant and Hilbert, in the preface to the first German edition of Methods of Mathematical Physics: "Recent trends and fashions have, however, weakened the connection between mathematics and physics. " Such trends are stil
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