Gibbs Phenomenon in the Truncated Discrete-Time Fourier Transform of the Sinc Sequence

Using a finite number of terms of the Fourier series approximating a function gives an overshoot at a discontinuity in the function. This is called the Gibbs phenomenon. This Demonstration shows the same phenomenon with the discrete-time Fourier transform (DTFT) of a sinc sequence. The oscillations around the discontinuity persist with an amplitude of roughly 9% of the original height.

Details

The Gibbs phenomenon was first observed in the 19th century, when trying to synthesize a square wave with a finite number of Fourier series coefficients. The oscillations around the discontinuities, while they became narrower, remained of constant amplitude even when more terms were added. This behavior was first attributed to flaws in the computation that was synthesizing the square wave, but J. Willard Gibbs in 1899 demonstrated that it was an actual mathematical phenomenon.

References

[1] M. Vetterli, J. Kovačević, and V. K. Goyal, Foundations of Signal Processing, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. www.fourierandwavelets.org.

External Links

Gibbs Phenomenon (Wolfram MathWorld)
Gibbs Phenomena for 1D Fourier Series
Ideal Nth-Band Discrete Filters

Permanent Citation

Jelena Kovacevic
​
​"Gibbs Phenomenon in the Truncated Discrete-Time Fourier Transform of the Sinc Sequence"​
​http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/GibbsPhenomenonInTheTruncatedDiscreteTimeFourierTransformOfT/​
​Wolfram Demonstrations Project​
​Published: June 18, 2012