a lecture given by one of my favorite hungarian scientists dennis gabor on information and information theory, 1951 (dennis gabor got the nobel prize for inventing holography, but never forgot to mention emmett leith)

In 1938, Wheeler and Loughren (20), in the course of a historically important and still valuable investigation of television problems, discussed signals of the form of a "cosine half-wave", or alternatively,signals whose spectrum has this shape. The author showed later (12) that if one prescribes that the spectrum must be limited to a certain bandwidth, signals with this spectrum will have the smallest effective duration, that is, these are the signals which one can drive in minimum effective time through a certain waveband. The uncertainty product At Af is 1.14, only 14 percent larger than the absolute minimum. | lectures on communication theory, dennis gabor