Week 2 - Mathematical Basics & Common Packages

26 Jun 2026 - Tanvir Islam - Learning, Python, fourier, JAX, numpy

Highlights From This Week

This week was all about building up the foundations I’ll need for the rest of the project.

I spent time reviewing some of the core maths behind S2FFT. I went back over Fourier transforms and ordinary differential equations, then looked at the basics of the fast Fourier transform. Since S2FFT is built around transforms on the sphere, getting comfortable with how the standard FFT works first felt like the right place to start.

On the coding side, I got more familiar with working with arrays in NumPy. I focused on this because NumPy is very similar to JAX, so getting comfortable with it now seemed like a good way to ease into JAX.

Looking into JAX a bit more was probably my favourite part of the week. It was nice to start seeing how the maths I revised earlier in the week connects to the tools I’ll actually be using.

My greatest achievement this week is surviving the dreadful heatwave.

Plan For Next Week

Next week I want to start putting this trying out the S2FFT tutorial examples.

I’d hoped to run the S2FFT examples this week, but I realised I was missing some of the mathematical background first; working through that has made the package much clearer, so next week I’ll be ready to dive into the examples.

I also plan to get more familiar with plotting and visualising outputs in Python, in preparation for making some of the tutorial documentation for the package.