TITLE: Are Fourier Analysis and Harmonic Analysis the same subject?
QUESTION [19 upvotes]: Are Fourier Analysis and Harmonic Analysis the same subject?
I believe that they are not the same.
Maybe there is big difference between those subjects but I need to know what is the main difference between those subjects and what is the main intersection?
What is the common between those subjects?

REPLY [4 votes]: I think there is great ambiguity about "Fourier analysis" and "harmonic analysis". To know what anyone means by either term one must know the context, typically, one must know the next noun or phrase in "harmonic/Fourier analysis on X". 
It is true that some patterns of use use one term as a special case, the other as more general, but this can be reversed, also. If I had to "bet", it might be that "harmonic" is more general than "Fourier" 60 percent of the time? Maybe? Luckily, we do not have to "commit".
Sometimes, yes, "Fourier..." is meant to restrict to _abelian_groups_, ... but sometimes "Fourier analysis" is done without admitting that anything is a group. "Harmonic..." may refer to structured analysis on a group, or homogeneous space, but, again, by observation, classical "harmonic analysis" did analysis on chunks of Euclidean spaces.
If anything, using either of these terms suggests that any groups (or chunks thereof) have more structure than just topological groups (although, historically, originally people had hopes that not much more would be necessary to develop a satisfactory theory). Especially for non-compact, non-abelian groups, often one would want a Lie group structure, or totally-disconnected group structure, or combination of the two.