ABSTRACT
The concept of “wavelets” or “ondelettes” started to appear in the literature only in the early 1980s. This new concept can be viewed as a synthesis of various ideas which originated from different disciplines including mathematics, physics and engineering. In 1982 Jean Morlet, a French geophysical engineer, first introduced the idea of wavelet transform as a new mathematical tool for seismic signal analysis. It was Alex Grossmann, a French theoretical physicist, who quickly recognized the importance of the Morlet wavelet transform which is something similar to coherent states formalism in quantum mechanics, and developed an exact inversion formula for the wavelet transform. In 1984 the joint venture of Morlet and Grossmann led to a detailed mathematical study of the continuous wavelet transforms and their various applications. It has become clear from their work that, analogous to the Fourier expansions, the wavelet theory has provided a new method for decomposing a function or a signal.
