Roughly speaking, the Fourier transform corresponds to a change of variables from time to frequency (in the context of harmonic analysis) or from position to momentum (in the context of quantum mechanics). In phase space, this is a 90 degree rotation. The fractional Fourier transform generalizes this to any angle rotation, giving a smooth mixture of time and frequency, or of position and momentum. The quadratic Fourier transform extends this further to the group of all linear symplectic transformations in phase space (of which rotations are a subgroup).