This book focuses on the discrete Fourier transform (DFT), discrete convolution, and, particularly, the fast algorithms to calculate them. These topics have been at the center of digital signal processing since its beginning, and new results in hardware, theory and applications continue to keep them important and exciting.

As far as we can tell, Gauss was the first to propose the techniques that we now call the fast Fourier transform (FFT) for calculating the coeficients in a trigonometric expansion of an asteroid's orbit in 1805. However, it was the seminal paper by Cooley and Tukey in 1965 that caught the attention of the science and engineering community and, in a way, founded the discipline of digital signal processing (DSP).

The impact of the Cooley-Tukey FFT was enormous. Problems could be solved quickly that were not even considered a few years earlier. A flurry of research expanded the theory and developed excellent practical programs as well as opening new applications. In 1976, Winograd published a short paper that set a second flurry of research in motion. This was another type of algorithm that expanded the data lengths that could be transformed eficiently and reduced the number of multiplications required. The ground work for this algorithm had be set earlier by Good and by Rader. In 1997 Frigo and Johnson developed a program they called the FFTW (fastest Fourier transform in the west), which is a composite of many of ideas in other algorithms as well as new results to give a robust, very fast system for general data lengths on a variety of computer and DSP architectures. This work won the 1999 Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software.