Pixels and Pranks

 

The other day, while sipping my morning coffee and doomscrolling through tech news, I came across Apple’s flashy new ad proudly announcing their latest camera feature: object removal from images. “Witchcraft!” the internet gasped. I, on the other hand, raised an eyebrow in quiet astonishment. Not because it was shocking but because Google Pixel and Samsung phones have been doing this since dinosaurs roamed the earth (okay, maybe just since 2017).

But what made me smile wasn’t Apple’s marketing swagger. It was the secret sauce behind such visual wizardry…the Fourier Transform; the mathematical equivalent of Clark Kent putting on glasses and turning into Superman.

And living in Cleveland, the birthplace of Superman I like to think it’s only fitting that I get excited about heroic transformations… even the pixelated kind.

Meet Joseph Fourier: The Man Who Wanted to Study Heat and Accidentally Invented Modern Technology

Joseph Fourier was a French mathematician with a fascination for how heat flows; not the most glamorous dinner party topic in 19th-century France, but he made it work.

He described how heat diffuses through a solid object over time. To solve the resulting differential equations, he used a method that involved breaking complex temperature distributions down into sine and cosine waves…essentially, what we now call Fourier series.

So, the original “waves” he worked with were mathematical sine and cosine waves used to model how heat (a physical phenomenon) behaved over time and space.

Fourier wasn’t thinking about sharpening blurry photos, compressing MP3s, removing backgrounds, or cancelling noise when he got to work…he simply wanted to understand how heat moved through a metal rod. But in the process, he uncovered a mathematical tool so powerful it became the backbone of everything from modern image processing to quantum mechanics.

He basically said: "Give me chaos, and I’ll find the rhythm."

In Images: Finding the Hidden Ingredients

Let’s say we’re looking at a photo. To our eyes, it’s just a landscape…sky, grass, mountains, a goat, maybe a photobomber in neon shorts.

But to a computer, that photo is just a big grid of numbers; pixels with brightness and colour values.

If we wanted to understand that image more deeply. Not just what it looks like, but how it’s built, the Fourier Transform takes that image and breaks it down into its ingredients…like a recipe.

• Smooth sky? That’s made of slow-changing waves (low frequencies).
• Sharp edges of buildings? Those are fast-changing waves (high frequencies).
• Random noise or grain? That’s also fast, but irregular.

So the Fourier Transform tells us:

“Here’s how much smoothness, sharpness, and noise this picture has.”

It's like turning a cake back into flour, sugar, and eggs…so you can adjust it.

But Why Would Anyone Do That?

Because once you know the ingredients, you can:

• Remove noise (get rid of the wrong notes).
• Compress the image (keep only the useful ingredients).
• Detect objects or patterns (find all the sprinkles).
• Erase things from a photo, like that neon tourist (fill in the hole by analyzing the waves around it).

So whether it’s a photo, a sound file, or a heartbeat on a monitor, the Fourier Transform helps reveal the hidden structure.

Fourier and the Divine Blueprint

Now here’s where I get a bit reflective…some habits from Catholic school, like reverence for hidden meaning, never really leave you. When Joseph Fourier set out to understand how heat moves through solid objects, he probably didn’t expect to brush up against the mysteries of the universe. But in trying to describe how warmth flowed across a metal rod, he stumbled upon something much bigger: a way to break the world down into waves.

Waves are everywhere. In sound, light, water, and even thought. They rise and fall, repeat and interfere, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes chaotically. What Fourier did was give us the ability to listen…to really listen…to these waves beneath the surface. He believed that even noise, even disorder, had structure. That nothing was truly random. That if we had the right tools, we could find the pattern behind the pattern.

That belief…that structure underlies seeming chaos feels, to me, almost theological. Not preachy, not doctrinal. Just quietly, beautifully faithful. It suggests that the universe isn’t just a collection of accidents, but something layered, intentional, rich with signal. That even our confusion, our noise, our pixelated lives have an underlying rhythm even if we can’t always hear it.

The Fourier Transform, then, becomes more than a clever trick. It’s a kind of intellectual reverence. A scientific form of wonder. It helps us see more clearly not just in images, but in meaning. It reminds me that maybe the sacred doesn’t only live in stained glass or sunsets, but also in the elegant clarity of the math that helps us understand them. Maybe the divine isn’t separate from data, but dancing in it wave after wave, echoing quietly beneath the surface.

And Apple? Late to the Party…But Well-Dressed

To be fair, Apple’s new “object removal” ad was slick. Slow-mo, perfect lighting, emotional soundtrack. They presented it like Moses parting the Red Sea.

But truth be told…Samsung and Google had this years ago.

Still, I’m glad Apple’s spotlighted it. It made me pause and marvel at how far we’ve come and how much of it rests on ideas dreamed up centuries ago, by people like Fourier, who saw the world not as random, but as rhythmic.

Final Thoughts

We live in a noisy world…cluttered photos, cluttered thoughts, cluttered timelines.

But somewhere beneath it all is pattern. Harmony. A wave we can tune into, if we have the tools and the trust to listen.

The Fourier Transform reminds me of something deeply true; that no matter how messy things look on the surface, there is order in the chaos, music in the mess, grace behind the glare. Even in your phone’s Photos app.

So go ahead. Erase the photobombers. Clean up the grainy picture. But remember…it’s not just tech. It’s a 200-year-old Frenchman. And maybe, just maybe, a whisper of the Divine.