'''Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier'''
[http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Fourier.html],
who flourished in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, 
was a mathematician and public figure whose solution of certain "heat problems" 
essentially frames all of modern analysis (or at least so [CL] proposes).  
"Fourier analysis", as he appears to have understood it, deals with the decomposition of functions 
into their harmonic components, that is, expression as a sum of  characteristic sinusoids or 
equivalent trigonometrics.

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[Category Mathematics]