It’s not often that you improve on a bit of math that has been around for 200 years. The Fourier transform was first proposed in 1811 by a Frenchman named Joseph Fourier, though it wasn’t until the middle of the 20th century that he was given the credit he deserved. His technique broke down a complex signal into a number of component signals, which could be transmitted or processed separately and then recombined to produce the original in a fairly nondestructive way.In 1965 the Fourier transform got a boost as James Cooley and John Tukey discovered a way to apply the transform on the fly using a computer. And now, in 2012, another major improvement has been proposed.