I understood electronic differentiators and integrators long before we did calculus in high school and I've always had more of a practical than mathematical leaning with that sort of stuff.
I guess what you're saying here is that if I pass a square wave through a lowpass filter - reducing the amplitude of the harmonics and rounding off the corners - then the peak amplitude will stay pretty much constant until I pull the cutoff of the filter down sufficiently close to the fundamental that it starts getting attenuated too.
I suppose: in the original problem we want to see what a sinc multiplied by sinc looks like (in time domain) or rect convolved with rect (analyzing in fourier domain). Also the width of the rects we're convolving with is shrinking after each time.
As you mentioned, to see what a rect convovled with a rect looks like, I think you can treat a convolution with rect as a lowpass filter (this should not be confused with convolving with sinc which gives an ideal" lowpass filter), and this gives intuition for why the erosion occurs.
What's not clear a priori to me is that the erosion will indeed actually reach the center. I think this depends on how fast the rect you're convolving with is shrinking, if it shrunk faster than {1, 1/3, 1/5, ...} then I don't think it would. I guess the easiest way to see this visually is to use the sliding method Grant showed, where the width of the y=1 peak after convolution is the overlapping width of the two rects. Thus we get 1, 1-1/3, 1-1/3-1/5,... which eventually < 0
I guess what you're saying here is that if I pass a square wave through a lowpass filter - reducing the amplitude of the harmonics and rounding off the corners - then the peak amplitude will stay pretty much constant until I pull the cutoff of the filter down sufficiently close to the fundamental that it starts getting attenuated too.
Makes sense I guess.