I’m looking for a place to go to grad school. Since I’m planning to make a bit of a switch of focus from the areas of research I have previously been working to the area I want to do my grad work in, this has necissitated a fair amount of digging around in the literature to try and develop some sort of clue about my new interests. Which has been sort of tedious, but sort of fun: it is, I suppose, undirected, unstructured research about whatever particularly appeals to me (it’s also a lot of sitting in chairs reading pieces of paper). I’ve come across this article, just the abstract of which has made my day, and which has inspired me to finally find out just what the hell wavelets are exactly. Having dug through a bunch of web-available tutorials on the subject, I am prepared to recommend the following as a good tutorial about wavelets, or at least as good as it’s going to get:

An Introduction to Wavelets, by Amara Graps.

you know, if you’re in to that sort of thing.