In 1978, Fred Harris was a relatively unknown faculty member at the San Diego State University when he published his landmark paper titled On the use of windows for harmonic analysis with the discrete Fourier transform. That paper made him a superstar in DSP community. It presented a brief overview of signal windows and their impact on the detection of harmonic signals in the presence of broad-band noise and nearby harmonic interference. More importantly, he pointed out several common errors in the application of windows when used in the context of Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT). Today I am going to write about how the paper started: by clarifying a common misconception about regular signal symmetry vs DFT symmetry that baffled
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