not until the early 1800s, when the eccentric french mathematician jean baptiste joseph fourier discovered that waves can be combined and separated. it was a discovery that no one believed at first but that changed music and math forever. fourier's revelations didn't begin with music, but rather, with his investigation of heat. friend and advisor to napoleon, fourier is said to have become obsessed with heat while accompanying bonaparte as chief science advisor on the 1798 military expedition to conquer egypt. fourier was apparently so impressed by the well-preserved sarcophagi that he kept his rooms uncomfortably hot for visitors while also wearing a heavy coat himself. the heated problem that fourier took on in his famous memoir, on the propagation of heat in solid objects, was the problem of heating and cooling of our earth, our own cycle of temperatures. the french mathematician developed his understanding of heat flow in terms of newton's law of cooling that says that the movement of heat between two bodies is proportional to their temperature difference. translating this to the infin