Amazingly explained. Electrical Engineer here who of course had to go through that, but still - Signal Processing amazes me any day. I shifted into Software Engineering, but Signal and Systems was the best subject in the entire degree❤
As I said, I don't use the word "flip" - it confuses too many people. Just evaluate the integral. If the integral had a "+tau" instead of "-tau" then it would be a different integral, and it wouldn't be convolution. For people who want intuition, here are two videos: "How to Understand Convolution" ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-x3Fdd6V_Hok.html and "What is Convolution? And Two Examples where it arises" ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-X2cJ8vAc0MU.html
@vsw1131 "Inverting" and "translating" is just another way of saying "flipping" and "shifting". It's true that some people find it easier to think of it that way, but in my experience a majority of students don't. In my experience most people find it easier to simply/directly "find the function" that's in the integral (rather than thinking about it as being a flipped and shifted version of the original function - even though that is what it is).
