[Captain_Usher]

This makes no sense.

I have an American degree and I've heard the phrase "Fourier transform" before, but I couldn't have possibly told you anything about it until I googled it just now. I wouldn't have expected any random Chinese academic to know either, no matter how good their institution was. I write software in a variety of languages every day at my full-time job, and while I've seen MATLAB code and could certainly teach myself to write it, I wouldn't bother if I could just have somebody else do it. Why would you expect some arbitrary group of Chinese scholars to share very specific skills and knowledge? If you gathered up a gaggle of researchers from anywhere else, you'd have to get pretty lucky to land a group where everybody was familiar with both one specific area of mathematics and one specific programming language.

[67726e]

Maybe take the charitable view that these visiting academics were in a field where this is surprising and expected knowledge. I don't get the feeling these were English majors.

[greggarious]

The fact he mentions this and MATLAB makes me think he's in the field of electrical engineering, where FTs are something you definitely need to understand.