India, Aug. 22 -- It's not often one algorithm shapes the entire arc of modern technology, but the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) has done exactly that. Created by researchers at Princeton University and IBM in the early 1960s, the FFT underpins everything from streaming video and audio to medical scanning and the backbone of AI and 5G networks. Even after six decades, this slice of genius is just as vital to today's digital age as it was when John Tukey and James Cooley first unveiled it.

Before FFT arrived, signal analysis was painfully slow. Engineers struggled with the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) which was both slow and memory-hungry. That's when John Tukey, a Princeton mathematician, and James Cooley, an IBM researcher, demonstra...