[Edu-sig] Thanks for the tip

[Chris Meyers]

Hi Jason

I agree it would be great if the book "Who was Fourier.." was available on the web and extended with Python as you 
suggest. I wonder if the contents could be used in the open source arena. Of course extending the book like this would be a 
*large* undertaking.

The HIPPO club also is intriguing. Too bad there are only two in the U.S. and both out your way. Oregon is a long way from 
New York.

One question that I have. Do students take to this book as enthusiastically as teachers and professionals? Students aren't 
likely to have had as much exposure previous exposure to the underlying ideas. For many of us, much of the book can be 
kind of a "cute" review that then leads to some surprising insights.

The book has students doing a fair amount of calculation by hand and that's probably a very good way to hammer home the 
ideas. Those might also be places where students could develope small Python programs to do the calculations as well, 
getting double mileage from the exercise.

I'm thinking of a small project to develope an object class of "wave". A simple wave can be generated from  a formula. 
Operations like addition and multiplication of waves create new and more complex waves. You can play with them at the 
python interactive prompt. And of course plot them. With a method to integrate a wave it would be straightforward to 
rediscover the Fourier coefficients using the technique in the book interactively. Then further automation. Maybe a "Python 
for Fun" project.

I've been playing with David Petterssons little frame buffer module that  lays on top of SDL. It would be fine for plotting
the waves. Right now it's busy hosting turtles in random motion while I'm trying to figure out if StarLogo-like programs can be 
done effectively in Python.

Chris