Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier was born in 1768. After dabbling in religion and teaching he was swept up in the French Revolution although he was a revolutionary he ended up being thrown in jail for his support for the victims of the Reign of Terror, by other revolutionaries. After a while and change in politics he was released.
At the age of 27 in 1795, Fourier took a job as a faculty member at the Ecole Polytechnique. Although after a bit of time the politics once again found him and he was put back into jail for his past offense. After some input from some well-known colleagues, he was release and posted overseas working for Napoleon during his takeover of parts of Egypt, in 1798. It is thought that his “heat obsession” started while he was posted in Egypt.
Napoleon made Fourier the secretary of the Institute of Egypt, and then soon after he was appointed Baron. To avoid being entangled in Napoleons downfall he cut ties and resigned his post.
After this he started back on his research, mainly on heat flow. He published a paper on the analytical theory of heat, to the Academy of Science. In this paper he reported how to show heat as solid bodies and he also created mathematics that allowed scientist to be able to solve problems that were once thought impossible. He introduced the idea that “an arbitrary function, even one defined by different analytic expressions in adjacent segments of its range (such as a staircase waveform), could nevertheless be represented by a single analytic expression”.
Formula:
x/2 = sin x - (sin 2x)/2 + (sin 3x)/3 + � � �
Fourier considered heat flow in a ring, or bar that has been bent into a circle. By doing this, the temperature distribution is forced to be spatially periodic. There is almost no loss of generality because the circumference of the ring is supposed larger than the greatest distance that could be of physical interest on a straight bar conducting heat.
Like most great inventors his works were subject to many skeptics, some of which were his past colleagues. He fought for 15 years to get his works published. Finally in 1822 it was published and by this time it had evolved in to an entire book.
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