Here's another history, of sorts, of the FFT that traces similar mathematical techniques back to Gauss. Here's a snippet: "In a recently published history of

Here's another history, of sorts, of the FFT that traces similar mathematical techniques back to Gauss. Here's a snippet: "In a recently published history of numerical analysis, H. H. Goldstine attributes to Carl Friedrich Gauss, the eminent German mathematician, an algorithm similar to the FFT for the computation of the coefficients of a finite Fourier series. Gauss' treatise describing the algorithm was not published in his lifetime; it appeared only in his collected works as an unpublished manuscript. " [1] http://www.cis.rit.edu/class/simg716/Gauss_History_FFT.pdf http://www.cis.rit.edu/class/simg716/Gauss_History_FFT.pdf