orthonormal comments on This is your brain on ambiguity - Less Wrong
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It's a little advanced, but I like Fourier's solution to the heat equation: any function satisfying certain properties can be thought of as a sum of waves (frequency being dual to position), and the heat equation is easy to solve if your initial data is such a wave. Constructing the solution from this perspective leads us to the heat kernel, which can be calculated without even breaking the function into waves in the first place!