Can You Hear the Shape of a Drum?

If you had perfect pitch and listened to a recording of the sounds a drum made when struck, could you determine the shape of the drum? This question is an example of an inverse problem; inverse problems arise in medical imaging, oil prospecting, spectroscopy, and many other fields. We’ll first discuss the analogous question in the simpler setting of plucking a string. Then we’ll tackle the problem for drums and see that there are some surprises. Finally, I will give a brief indication of how this problem relates to some of my recent research. The emphasis will be on the ideas rather than on the technical details, so there will be pretty pictures instead of equations.

A project-oriented course in probability and statistics for undergraduate electrical engineering students

An introductory course in probability and statistics for third-year and fourth-year electrical engineering students is described. The course is centered around several computer-based projects that are designed to achieve two objectives. First, the projects illustrate the course topics and provide hands-on experience for the students. The second and equally important objective of the projects is to convey the relevance and usefulness of probability and statistics to practical problems that undergraduate students can appreciate. The benefit of this course as to motivate electrical engineering students to excel in the study of probability concepts, instead of viewing the subject as one more course requirement toward graduation. The authors co-teach the course, and MATLAB is used for mast of the computer-based projects