Also known as: Harry Nyquist, Nyquist

Harry Nyquist (1889–1976) was a Swedish-American engineer at Bell Labs whose work on the maximum signalling rate of a channel underlies the sampling theorem at the heart of digital radio.¹

Nyquist established the sampling limit at the heart of all digital radio; the Nyquist rate bears his name.

Life and work

Nyquist studied how fast pulses could be sent over a channel without interference, establishing the relationship between bandwidth and sample rate later formalised with Claude Shannon.¹

Contribution

The Nyquist rate — sampling at twice the bandwidth — tells engineers how fast an ADC must run.

Legacy

His name marks the boundary every SDR respects to avoid aliasing.

Sources

1. Harry Nyquist — Wikipedia, for biography and his work on sampling and signalling theory. ↩ ↩²

See also

• Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem
• Sample rate
• Claude Shannon
• Aliasing

Learn it step by step

• Sample rate, bandwidth & Nyquist