Ingrid Daubechies, a Belgian researcher and physicist at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, discovered the perfect tool for wavelet theory: a mother wavelet with no tail at all (previous attempts in the early 1980s by Jean Morlet, Alexander Grossman, and Yves Meyer had led to mother wavelets, but with tails to infinity). Wavelets allow Fourier analysis of impulsive signals (bypassing the problem of the integral from minus-infinite time to plus-infinite time in canonical Fourier analysis).
