 Jean-Baptiste José Fourier was a French mathematician and scientist famous for what is now known as the Fourier series, which uses sine and cosine waves as a way of representing any periodic function. Fourier was born in the year 1768 to a large and humble family in France. Often at the age of nine, he was given financial support to complete his education. A political activist with a keen interest in Egyptology and an uncanny mathematical ability, he served as Napoleon's scientific advisor during Napoleon's Egyptian campaign before returning to France to complete his most famous work, The Theory of the Propagation of Heat in Solid Bodies. It was in this work presented to the Paris Institute in 1807 that he proposed any function of a variable, whether continuous or discontinuous, can be expanded in a series of signs of multiples of the variable, an idea we now call the Fourier series.