Author here: thanks for sharing!

I agree with your opinion about the naming being confusing. Specifically regarding your mathematician friend what would you lose by taking a fast Fourier transform over a normal Fourier transform? Well the two aren't interchangeable. You would lose continuous time / frequency!

Some personal preference:

I find it hard to read the grey text on a white background that you have, and it's probably just a fundamental limit of reader mode in firefox, but it doesn't render mathml right. To read it I zoomed in, but then there were CSS issues where the content overlapped the sidebar.

While |x| is common to reference the length of a set I've not really seen that to reference the number of elements in a vector in the fields where I've used discrete Fourier transforms. I've always just defined N as the length of my vector. I honestly read it at first as the norm of x, and the norm of F{x} and thought you might be about to talk about Parseval's theorem.

Enjoyable enough and accurate article though. Thanks!

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connorboyle 4 days ago | parent [-]

Thanks for reading and commenting.

I used "|x|" notation because I don't like introducing new unknown names if I don't have to. Too bad the annotation is ambiguous; I'll make a note about it.

If you right-click on the math blocks, you can change some of the parameters of the MathJAX renderer. One feature I've found helpful is the "click to zoom" which can be activated by following `Math Settings -> Zoom Trigger -> Click`.

I tried changing the text color. How does it look to you now?

	▲	timeinput 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		I find the new text color easier to read. I hope everyone else shares my opinion since you put some work into catering to it. Math notation is not great generally. There are canonical notations for somethings, and some times they're overloaded. Not much to do about it other than know about it. Annoyingly you have to "know your audience" to get your math notation right for who you're presenting to. (You can never really do that on the Internet) As an electrical engineer who's done a lot of DSP and worked with mathematicians I can point out some things that look either odd or normal depending on who I'm talking to. You can never really win with notation -- you'll always be wrong to someone =), but there are choices that are maybe less wrong for one discipline or another. All that to say keep writing! You're doing pretty well!