Something called the fast Fourier transform is running on your cell phone right now. The FFT, as it is known, is a signal-processing algorithm that you use more than you realize. It is, according to the title of one research paper, “an algorithm the whole family can use.”

Alexander Stoytchev—an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Iowa State University who’s also affiliated with the university’s Virtual Reality Applications Center, its Human Computer Interaction graduate program and the department of computer science—says the FFT algorithm and its inverse (known as the IFFT) are at the heart of signal processing.

And, as such, “These are algorithms that made the digital revolution possible,” he said.