Hmmm, well its a very interesting question. I'm not entirely sure what I would do in your shoes, but some places start looking may be:
Why are Fourier series on the curriculum? There must be a reason why they are so important that a whole undergraduate course would be dedicated to them.
How and when were Fourier series first described? I understand Joseph Fourier made some pretty major contributions to maths. What was he trying to achieve? Did Fourier series help him do it? Why did other people pay attention, and how was the idea popularised?
Finally, if you really don't know anything about EE or any other applications for it may be a good idea for you to lean a bit more about the various fields that are built on top of yours. Having a better understanding about how your area of interest relates to others is always a good thing.
I know from a software point of view, even though they are hidden from day to day coding, Fourier series are hugely important. Fourier series allow us to compress audio and images down to sizes where they can easily be transferred across the internet [1]. Almost every single digital image you see, song you listen to and movie you watch will have had a fourier transform applied to it. Did you know that movies on netflix account now account for 32% of north american internet traffic? Without the fourier transform its safe to say the world wide web as we know it would not exist.
Furthermore, because it is actually practical to transfer movies and songs across the internet, mass piracy of media is possible. Millions of people are sharing (fourier transform compressed!) movies over sites like the pirate bay. This has lead to a backlash from established media corporations demanding stronger copyright protections. Currently a huge legislative battle is being fought, which will have a impact on such disparate areas as the future of censorship, what rights people have over the things they create and the role of money in politics.
All because of what the fourier series lets us do!
Why are Fourier series on the curriculum? There must be a reason why they are so important that a whole undergraduate course would be dedicated to them.
How and when were Fourier series first described? I understand Joseph Fourier made some pretty major contributions to maths. What was he trying to achieve? Did Fourier series help him do it? Why did other people pay attention, and how was the idea popularised?
Finally, if you really don't know anything about EE or any other applications for it may be a good idea for you to lean a bit more about the various fields that are built on top of yours. Having a better understanding about how your area of interest relates to others is always a good thing.
I know from a software point of view, even though they are hidden from day to day coding, Fourier series are hugely important. Fourier series allow us to compress audio and images down to sizes where they can easily be transferred across the internet [1]. Almost every single digital image you see, song you listen to and movie you watch will have had a fourier transform applied to it. Did you know that movies on netflix account now account for 32% of north american internet traffic? Without the fourier transform its safe to say the world wide web as we know it would not exist.
Furthermore, because it is actually practical to transfer movies and songs across the internet, mass piracy of media is possible. Millions of people are sharing (fourier transform compressed!) movies over sites like the pirate bay. This has lead to a backlash from established media corporations demanding stronger copyright protections. Currently a huge legislative battle is being fought, which will have a impact on such disparate areas as the future of censorship, what rights people have over the things they create and the role of money in politics.
All because of what the fourier series lets us do!
This is, to put it mildly, of some interest :-)
[1] : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrete_cosine_transform