James Cooley
American mathematician (1926-2016)
James William Cooley (September 18, 1926 – June 29, 2016) was an American mathematician. Cooley received a B.A. degree in 1949 from Manhattan College, Bronx, New York, an M.A. degree in 1951 from Columbia University, New York City, and a Ph.D. degree in 1961 in applied mathematics from Columbia University. He was a programmer on John von Neumann's computer at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, from 1953 to 1956, where he notably programmed the Blackman–Tukey transformation.
He worked on quantum mechanical computations at the Courant Institute, New York University, from 1956 to 1962, when he joined the Research Staff at the IBM Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York. Upon retirement from IBM in 1991, he joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Rhode Island, Kingston, where he served on the faculty of the computer engineering program.
His most significant contribution to the world of mathematics and digital signal processing is re-discovering the fast Fourier transform, which he co-developed with John Tukey (see Cooley–Tukey FFT algorithm) while working for the research division of IBM in 1965.
The motivation for it was provided by Dr. Richard L. Garwin at IBM Watson Research who was concerned about verifying a nuclear arms treaty with the Soviet Union for the SALT talks. Garwin thought that if he had a very much faster Fourier Transform he could plant sensors in the ground in countries surrounding the Soviet Union. He suggested to both Cooley and Tukey how Fourier transforms could be programmed to be much faster.
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This entry incorporates text from “James Cooley” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.