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Phoenix666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

As Yves Meyer was getting ready to publish a detailed mathematical proof [phys.org] that he had spent months working on, he decided do a final search of the existing literature. In the reference list of one of the papers he had just peer-reviewed, he noticed what he describes as a "bizarre" paper published in 1959 by Andrew Paul Guinand. Upon further investigation, he was shocked to discover that Guinand had formulated the exact same proof to solve the same problem that Meyer had been working on, though the solution had remained deeply buried and completely forgotten.
                                                               

Meyer, a Professor Emeritus at the École Normale Supérieure de Cachan, accordingly revised and published his paper [pnas.org], which appeared just a few weeks ago in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In his work, he proves that there is not just one, but many Poisson summation formulas, using a simpler solution than was previously known.

Meyer—who has spent his career making fundamental contributions to wavelet theory and number theory, and recently won the Gauss Prize [icm2010.in]—explains that at first he was somewhat embarrassed that someone else had made the same discovery many decades earlier. However, he also interprets the experience as an example of a more universal pattern: that all of human discovery builds on what comes before.

"Suddenly I understood what I have been steadily doing in my scientific life," Meyer told Phys.org. "I was transmitting a heritage. Today I can express my gratitude to Guinand, who was a great person, both as a human being and as a mathematician."

That's a tale to strike terror into the heart of every grad student...

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