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In the foreword of Tom Wolff's "Lectures on Harmonic Analysis", C. Fefferman writes "[Wolff made] (as far as I know) the first serious application of theoretical computer science to analysis." What does this refer to?

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    $\begingroup$ There's an article on the Kakeya problem that alludes to his work linking harmonic analysis and combinatorial geometry. ams.org/bull/2008-45-01/S0273-0979-07-01189-5/… $\endgroup$
    – Suresh Venkat
    Commented Feb 21, 2010 at 22:49
  • $\begingroup$ I'm aware that there are connections between combinatorics and Kakeya (Bourgain, Tao, and Laba all have surveys on this topic). However, I'm not sure which of these one would classify as an application of CS. $\endgroup$
    – Mark Lewko
    Commented Feb 22, 2010 at 0:32
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    $\begingroup$ I know very little about the specific applications, but the survey mentions specific incidence problems in combinatorial geometry - this is a classical part of TCS (specifically in the area of computational geometry, where such combinatorial estimates are used to bound the running times of various algorithms) $\endgroup$
    – Suresh Venkat
    Commented Feb 22, 2010 at 2:20

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