I would have been much less intimidated by some of these if, at the time I learned them, I had realized (or had been told!) they were only such recent inventions. I've always been very put down by thinking I was only learning the basic stuff and still had a lot of math to go before being able to do interesting stuff that hadn't been done already. As it turns out, what I learned in signal processing was pretty much state of the art and I could have started to think of new applications right away :/
I had in a way an opposite reaction. I was surprised that the most recent algorithm listed was discovered as long ago as 1987. I didn't notice any date on the paper so I'm assuming it's recent. Judging by the dates, the period of most rapid discovery ended in the mid-sixties, at which point it slowed down and then slowed down much more in the eighties. The overall pattern of slow-down is not terribly surprising (low hanging fruit and all), but that the list ends in 1987 is surprising.
