What Nyquist Didn't Say

Hello Glen,

> 
>>> By the way, Gauss published the first paper on the FFT.
> 
>> (Actually, Gauss never published it.  It was only published
>> posthumously as part of his notes.)
> 
> 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.
> 

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.

-- 
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com

glen herrmannsfeldt wrote:
> stevenj@alum.mit.edu wrote:
> > glen herrmannsfeldt wrote:
> >>By the way, Gauss published the first paper on the FFT.
> > (Actually, Gauss never published it.  It was only published
> > posthumously as part of his notes.)
>
> Then, Gauss wrote the first published paper on FFT?

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
1984.)

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

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

glen herrmannsfeldt wrote:
> stevenj@alum.mit.edu wrote:
> > glen herrmannsfeldt wrote:
> >>By the way, Gauss published the first paper on the FFT.
> > (Actually, Gauss never published it.  It was only published
> > posthumously as part of his notes.)
>
> Then, Gauss wrote the first published paper on FFT?

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
1984.)

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

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