The Importance of Sinusoids - Part I: Fourier Analysis
November 30, 1998

• Sinusoidal signals are of paramount importance in the analysis and design of a very important class of systems considered by Electrical Engineers.
• The reason for this importance is twofold:
  • Non-sinusoidal signals can be represented as sums of sinusoids.
  • Sinusoids are eigenfunctions of linear systems, i.e., if a sinusoid is input to a linear system then the output will be a sinusoid of the same frequency.
• We will focus on the first property, initially.