A Hard Day's Night: Solving a Beatles Mystery with Mathematics | Hacker News Reader

A Hard Day's Night: Solving a Beatles Mystery with Mathematics

abc.net.au

29 pointsempressplay11 comments

This article has to be garbage if a math professor hadn't heard of Fourier transforms until reading a book about sound and math. Maybe I'm coming from an engineering background but it's a very basic concept that I learned to use to break down sound in a general freshman year engineering class.

The Fourier transform can be introduced at vastly different levels of sophistication - engineers see it freshman year, physics programs usually wait until they've derived the wave equation, and if you're a math professor whose goal is to invent novel math, it's probably not even worth knowing unless you are going to spend years and years on it.

I don't think it's possible to complete a maths program without spending some time with Fourier series in the context of vector spaces of functions, convergence of series of functions, linear operators and so on. However, I can very much imagine that applications, e.g. to sound processing, are not particularly emphasized; so it might have taken that book for the professor to make the right connection.

At least they didn't "rediscover" Fourier transforms for audio analysis, in the vein of https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-research...

It is probably just the journalist not getting the story quite right. It does not automatically invalidate the salient parts.

This is the correct explanation. The journalist misunderstood something he said to mean he discovered Fourier transforms at that later time.

2008: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=347231.

Pretty sure there have been other HN threads about this too...

Edit: 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8749450

The article talks about how the chord was a mystery and the ways people tried to find it... but it doesn't tell us what the chord is!

I now know there's an F on a piano that's one part of it, but what about the other guitar parts?

http://www.mscs.dal.ca/~brown/n-oct04-harddayjib.pdf

According to a prior HN comment by LogicHoleFlaw here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=347486

From the paper:

George Harrison on 12-string pairs 2 through 5: (A2 A3) (D3 D4) (G3 G4) (C4 C4)

George Martin on piano: D3 F3 D5 G5 E6

John Lennon on 6-string: C5

Paul McCartney on his Höfner bass: D3

I'll be more convinced when they actually produce a recording of this.

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