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93 points rbanffy | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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teleforce ◴[] No.42189724[source]
Fun facts, FFT was discovered back in 1965 based on the urgent necessity of discovering and detecting illegal nuke testing activities, just two years after the Partial Test Ban Treaty (PTBT) was signed in 1963 [1].

The first sentence statement in the article mentioning that United States and other nuclear powers committed to the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty in 1965 is wrong since the treaty was only signed in 1996 not in 1965 [2].

[1] The Algorithm That Almost Stopped The Development Of Nuclear Weapons:

https://www.iflscience.com/the-algorithm-that-almost-stopped...

[2] The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty:

https://www.ctbto.org/our-mission/the-treaty

replies(3): >>42189899 #>>42192800 #>>42193163 #
1. adrian_b ◴[] No.42192800[source]
True, but like many modern inventions the discovery of FFT was a rediscovery.

Precursors of FFT have existed in various mathematical works, starting with Gauss, but such algorithms were neglected before the existence of automatic computers that could apply them to problems big enough for the dependence of the solving time on the size of the problem to matter.