Signal Processing Stories
These stories were created mostly by generative AI. I used a generative AI to generate some story ideas and then wrote some detailed prompts that created a narrative for the stories. Each story also included narratives that were fed into the OpenAI DALL-E 3 text to image system. You can see examples of the narrative prompts, the image prompts and the reference prompts.
Frequency Hopping: The Untold Story of Hedy Lamarr, Engineer and Hollywood Star
In the glittering world of 1940s Hollywood, Hedy Lamarr led an extraordinary double life - by day, she was a glamorous movie star dubbed "the most beautiful woman in the world," but by night, she was a brilliant inventor whose mind would revolutionize modern technology. After escaping her controlling first husband, an Austrian arms manufacturer where she secretly absorbed technical knowledge about weapons systems, Hedy fled to America and became a film star. During World War II, she conceptualized frequency-hopping technology to prevent enemy jamming of radio-controlled torpedoes, collaborating with composer George Antheil to develop a synchronization method inspired by player pianos. Though their 1942 patent was initially dismissed by the U.S. Navy, who couldn't fathom that an actress could contribute to military technology, their groundbreaking invention eventually became the foundation for secure military communications, GPS, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi used by billions today. Hedy's remarkable story exemplifies the qualities of a great engineer - curiosity, creativity, persistence, and courage - and stands as a powerful reminder that innovation can come from unexpected places, regardless of gender or profession.
Read the Frequency Hopping Story
Algorithm of the Century: Cooley and Tukey's FFT Revolution
This tells the story of how James Cooley and John Tukey revolutionized signal processing by developing the Fast Fourier Transform algorithm in 1965 during the Cold War. Born from the practical need to detect Soviet nuclear tests, their breakthrough reduced calculation time from N² to N log N operations, making previously impossible computations feasible on 1960s computers. The algorithm spread rapidly across scientific disciplines after being published, enabling real-time signal analysis for applications ranging from seismology to astronomy. The FFT ultimately transformed entire industries—creating the foundation for digital signal processing, enabling technologies like MRI machines, digital audio, telecommunications, and countless other innovations that shape our modern digital world. Their story illustrates how elegant mathematical solutions to efficiency problems can have far greater impact than raw computing power alone.
The Wavelet Revolution: Ingrid Daubechies' Mathematical Journey
Ingrid Daubechies, a brilliant Belgian mathematician working in her garden in 1980, saw mathematical patterns where others saw only flowers and soil. Recognizing the limitations of traditional Fourier transforms in analyzing real-world signals that change over time, she worked tirelessly to develop a revolutionary alternative. In 1987, despite skepticism from her male-dominated field, Daubechies created the first orthogonal wavelets with compact support—mathematical building blocks that could capture both frequency and time information in signals. Her breakthrough transformed numerous fields, from digital image compression to medical imaging, ultimately becoming fundamental to modern technologies like JPEG2000 and MP3 files. Breaking glass ceilings, she received the MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship and became the first female president of the International Mathematical Union and the first female full professor in Princeton's Mathematics Department. Beyond her mathematical contributions, Daubechies demonstrated that the qualities of great engineers and scientists—persistence, creativity, courage, and connecting abstract ideas to practical needs—are not limited by gender, creating waves of change that continue to inspire diverse new generations of mathematicians and engineers.