Fourier series: Introduction
Example of a square wave
We consider the periodic continuation of the function The Fourier sine coefficients are The Fourier sine series is in this case: In the figure below, the graphs of the square wave and the Fourier sine series with 4 and 16 terms, respectively, have been plotted.
The frequency-amplitude spectrum is shown below: You can see at a glance that the even Fourier sine coefficients are zero and that the frequency levels decrease with increasing .
You can also use the interactive version below to get an impression of how well the function is approximated by a Fourier series and what the frequency-amplitude spectrum looks like.
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