Preface

Summary

Basically, this is a book about mathematics, pitched at the advanced undergraduate/beginning graduate level, where ideas from signal processing are used to motivate much of the material, and applications of the theory to signal processing are featured. It is meant for math students who are interested in potential applications of mathematical structures and for students from the fields of application who want to understand the mathematical foundations of their subject. The first few chapters cover rather standard material in Fourier analysis, functional analysis, probability theory and linear algebra, but the topics are carefully chosen to prepare the student for the more technical applications to come. The mathematical core is the treatment of the linear system y = Φx in both finite-dimensional and infinite-dimensional cases. This breaks up naturally into three categories in which the system is determined, overdetermined or underdetermined. Each has different mathematical aspects and leads to different types of application. There are a number of books with some overlap in coverage with this volume, e.g., [11, 15, 17, 19, 53, 69, 71, 72, 73, 82, 84, 95, 99, 101], and we have profited from them. However, our text has a number of features, including its coverage of subject matter, that together make it unique. An important aspect of this book on the interface between fields is that it is largely self-contained. Many such books continually refer the reader elsewhere for essential background material.