James Cooley

James William Cooley (September 18, 1926 – June 29, 2016 ) was an American mathematician. Cooley received a B.A. degree in 1949 from Manhattan College, Bronx, New York, an M.A. degree in 1951 from Columbia University, New York City, and a Ph.D. degree in 1961 in applied mathematics from Columbia University. He was a programmer on John von Neumann's computer at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, from 1953 to 1956, where he notably programmed the Blackman–Tukey transformation.

He worked on quantum mechanical computations at the Courant Institute, New York University, from 1956 to 1962, when he joined the Research Staff at the IBM Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York. Upon retirement from IBM in 1991, he joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Rhode Island, Kingston, where he served on the faculty of the computer engineering program.

His most significant contribution to the world of mathematics and digital signal processing is re-discovering the fast Fourier transform, In 2002 he received the IEEE Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal. He considerably contributed to the establishing of terminology in digital signal processing.

Publications James W. Cooley (1961): "An improved eigenvalue corrector formula for solving the Schrödinger equation for central fields", Math. Comput. 15, 363–374. doi:10.1090/S0025-5718-1961-0129566-X This describes the so-called Numerov-Cooley method for numerically solving one-dimensional Schrödinger equations. James W. Cooley & John W. Tukey (1965): "An algorithm for the machine calculation of complex Fourier series", Math. Comput. 19, 297–301. Cooley, James W., Timothy M. Toolan and Donald W. Tufts. "A Subspace Tracking Algorithm Using the Fast Fourier Transform." IEEE Signal Processing Letters. 11(1):30–32. January 2004. Real, Edward C., Donald W. Tufts and James W. Cooley. "Two Algorithms for Fast Approximate Subspace Tracking." IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing. 47(7):1936–1945. July 1999. Tufts, D. W., E. C. Real and J. W. Cooley. "Fast Approximate Subspace Tracking (FAST)." IN: Proceedings of the 1997 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing. IEEE. 1997. I:547–550.