Norbert Wiener the amount of noise present in a signal by comparison with an estimate of the desired noiseless signal. Wiener developed the filter at the Radiation Laboratory at MIT to predict the position of German bombers from radar reflections. It is necessary to predict the future, because by the time the shell reaches the vicinity of the target, the target has moved, and maybe has changed direction slightly. They even modeled the muscle response of the pilot, which led eventually to cybernetics. The unmanned V1's were particularly easy to model, and on a good day, American guns fitted with Wiener filters
Paley–Wiener theorem Paley–Wiener theorem In mathematics, a Paley–Wiener theorem is any theorem that relates decay properties of a function or distribution at infinity with analyticity of its Fourier transform. The theorem is named for Raymond Paley (1907–1933) and Norbert Wiener (1894–1964). The original theorems did not use the language of distributions, and instead applied to square-integrable functions. The first such theorem using distributions was due to Laurent Schwartz. The classical Paley–Wiener theorems make use of the holomorphic Fourier transform on classes of square-integrable functions supported on the real line. Formally, the idea is to take the integral defining the (inverse) Fourier transform