Main Page | See live article | Alphabetical index The Gibbs phenomenon, first observed by Albert Michelson via a mechanical graphing machine and first explained by Willard Gibbs, is the peculiar mode in which the Fourier series of a piecewise continuous periodic function f fails to converge uniformly to f. At a jump discontinuity of f, the nth partial sum of the Fourier series jumps too far and overshoots its target. External links Why are sine waves fundamental Gibbs phenomenon - from mathworld http://lcavwww.epfl.ch/~prandoni/dsp/gibbs/gibbs.html This is a very stubby article. What appears above needs to be made precise and explicit. At least one graphical illustration should be added. This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.