A Brief History of Wavelets

                                    by Brandon Kieft

This site was created to give a short background to the mathematical field of wavelets.  Although roots of modern wavelets date back to the early 1800's, research on this topic hasn't made extreme advances until recently.
    Wavelets are currently being used in fields such as signal and image processing, human and computer vision, data compression, and many others.  Even though the average person probably knows very little about the concept of wavelets, the impact that they have in today's technological world is phenomenal.
 

The Main Contributors to the History of Wavelets

• Joseph Fourier

• Alfred Haar

• Paul Levy

• Jean Morlet and Alex Grossman

• Stephane Mallat and Yves Meyer

• Ingrid Daubechies

Here are some examples using the wavelets

• Projecting a function onto Fourier Space

• Finding the Fourier Transform of a function

• Determining a function's projection using the Haar Wavelets

• Signal Compressing and Decomposing

Other Links to Wavelet Websites
 

• www.amara.com/IEEEwave/IEEEwavelet.html.   This site also has a brief account of the history behind wavelets.  It introduces a few more people surrounding the topic of wavelets, but isn't very detailed.
• www.wavelet.org/wavelet/tutorial/whistory.htm.   This is another site with a brief history about the mathematical field of wavelets.
• www.mathsoft.com/wavelets.html   If you page down a little bit on this site, we will see tons of other links to lots of different wavelet topics.