In 1994, in my role as Technical Program Chair for the 17th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, I solicited proposals for mini-symposia to provide delegates with accessible summaries of important issues in research areas outside their particular specializations. Terry Peters and his colleagues submitted a proposal for a symposium on Fourier Trans- forms and Biomedical Engineering whose goal was "to demystify the Fourier transform and describe its practical application in biomedi- cal situations." This was to be achieved by presenting the...