What Nyquist Didn't Say

Then, Gauss wrote the first published paper on FFT?

If you want to put it that way, very few people publish papers, they just send them to someone else to publish.

But yes, I had forgotten that.

-- glen

On Mon, 02 Oct 2006 09:13:52 -0700, Tim Wescott wrote in Msg.

Don't worry. If you put the link in the pdf, people that like your stuff and are interested will come to your site for more, even if they only read it on the print-out. Uninterested people won't go to your site at all, HTML or not, unless you also put up some free p*rn.

robert

Hello Glen,

We have to remember what means there were back in their days. Far fewer journals with available space. No word processors. Very costly type-setting process. Etc.

Even nowadays publishing isn't easy. I have done a few and the whole process is quite laborious. However, we now have an excellent means of publishing just about anything (legal) we want: The web. Everybody can set up a web site and go ahead. Also, you can publish your ideas in newsgroups just like this one. All that provides instant publication. Gauss, Nyquist and others didn't have all this and I assume Shannon was too far into retirement by then as well. AFAIR he passed away at old age around five years ago.

No. Gauss' work was not published until 1866, as a part of his collected works. Prior to that, there were various authors who published related algorithms (e.g. a paper by Everett in 1860, one published by Archibald Smith in 1846, and one published by F. Carlini in 1828, although these works only described restricted cases).

What does seem to be true is that Gauss was the first *recorded* discoverer of an FFT. He was also (apparently) the only author until Cooley & Tukey in 1965 to describe a general mixed-radix algorithm for any composite size.

(See the excellent paper, "Gauss and the History of the Fast Fourier Transform," by Heideman et al., IEEE ASSP Magazine, p. 14, October

You're being a bit too pedantic for my taste; by "publish" in science, we usually mean "initiate the publication process".

Regards, Steven G. Johnson

No. Gauss' work was not published until 1866, as a part of his collected works. Prior to that, there were various authors who published related algorithms (e.g. a paper by Everett in 1860, one published by Archibald Smith in 1846, and one published by F. Carlini in 1828, although these works only described restricted cases).

What does seem to be true is that Gauss was the first *recorded* discoverer of an FFT. He was also (apparently) the only author until Cooley & Tukey in 1965 to describe a general mixed-radix algorithm for any composite size.

(See the excellent paper, "Gauss and the History of the Fast Fourier Transform," by Heideman et al., IEEE ASSP Magazine, p. 14, October

You're being a bit too pedantic for my taste; by "publish" in science, we usually mean "initiate the publication process".

Regards, Steven G. Johnson