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Comment by jomamaxx | Hacker News Reader

I 'took' the stanford NLP course online it was great.

Doing this one now.

Funny - I did Fourier in Comp. Eng. - but it was jammed together with so many other things, I felt overwhelmed by all of it, I did enough to do decently on the exam, but I feel a lot of it was lost on me, and I forgot much of it.

Using fourier in most computer applications is very rare!

I'm excited to have a project I need to use it for - and weirdly stocked to be watching this video.

I love it when I have a reason to learn something awesome ...

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The prof noted that it's almost all EE folks, with a few others, but didn't mention Comp Sci. Can anyone comment on why there were seemingly no Comp Sci people in this class? Wouldn't this be 'core' to Comp Sci?

Not in this detail, no. And I bet there many are CS curricula where fourier transforms aren't in the core courses (or even not explicitly present at all).

It's only relevant for some application domains (and has no "pure" CS use case I can think of), so a basic idea what it does, as a single lecture in a maths course or so, is probably enough in many cases. If you go in an field that uses it, you hopefully learn it in more detail there (or go googling for resources like this...).

>The prof noted that it's almost all EE folks, with a few others, but didn't mention Comp Sci. Can anyone comment on why there were seemingly no Comp Sci people in this class? Wouldn't this be 'core' to Comp Sci?

Why would it? Core CS deals primarily with discrete mathematics. Outside of a DSP or image processing course, there's little reason for a CS student to encounter the Fourier or other transforms.

I took a class on Scientific Computing (required) which went over a lot of core algorithms in various fields, including FFT. I wouldn't be surprised if a good portion of programs had something similar.

I don't see Fourier Transforms as core to CS at all. The FFT algorithm is an important algorithm, and I've seen it mentioned as one of many subjects in an upper-level algorithms class, but that's it.

Maybe at Carneigie Mellon, or the better universities. In a typical uni comp sci is a programming monkey degree (at least in Australia...)

Which NLP course are you referring to? Did it have any videos available?

Stanford NLP - Professor Dan Jurafsky & Chris Manning

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfoudtpBV68

It's on youtube.

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