I’m a biochemist, and at undergrad, the way we learned about how protein structure is determined via X-ray crystallography was basically “We crystallise the proteins like this, then we shoot some X-rays at it, and obtain a diffraction pattern, which we then do some mathememagic on, and voila! You have a 3d structure of a protein”
It frustrated me that we basically just handwaved the process of how we go from the diffraction pattern to a 3d structure (biochemists don’t really need to understand the nitty gritty of how this works, tbf). It took me quite a few months to go digging deeper in my quest to independently learn how this mathememagic worked — it took so long because although questing in the tomes of chemistry helped, I then had to turn to physics books if I wanted to actually understand stuff.
But then again, I see Fast Fourier Transforms, I upvote, too
I fucking love Fourier Fast Transforms.
I’m a biochemist, and at undergrad, the way we learned about how protein structure is determined via X-ray crystallography was basically “We crystallise the proteins like this, then we shoot some X-rays at it, and obtain a diffraction pattern, which we then do some mathememagic on, and voila! You have a 3d structure of a protein”
It frustrated me that we basically just handwaved the process of how we go from the diffraction pattern to a 3d structure (biochemists don’t really need to understand the nitty gritty of how this works, tbf). It took me quite a few months to go digging deeper in my quest to independently learn how this mathememagic worked — it took so long because although questing in the tomes of chemistry helped, I then had to turn to physics books if I wanted to actually understand stuff.
So glad I did though. FFT is very cool.
Fast Fourier Transforms literally put food on my table many times in the past. Final Fantasy has never done that for me. But it might someday.