"... In their mathematical aspect, wavelets are rooted in the use of dilations and convolutions in Calderón-Zygmund theory in harmonic analysis. ... Algorithmically, wavelets are related to subband filtering in electrical engineering. Subband filtering was developed from the 70-s on; exact reconstruction procedures were discovered in the early 80-s. These were obviously fast algorithms, meant as a front-end processing step before encoding or compressing information in various types of signals. A lot of effort went into optimizing the filters for various applications, and this subfield of electrical engineering is now quite mature. ... Another algorithmic ancestor of wavelets are the multiple algorithms in numerical analysis, closer to mathematics, but still ad hoc."
January 1, 1970
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ingrid_Daubechies