James William Cooley (born 1926) is an
American mathematician. Cooley received a B.A. degree in 1949 from
Manhattan College, Bronx, NY, an M.A. degree in 1951 from
Columbia University, New York, NY, and a Ph.D. degree in 1961 in applied mathematics from Columbia University. He was a programmer on
John von Neumann's computer at the
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ, from 1953 to 1956. He worked on quantum mechanical computations at the
Courant Institute, New York University, from 1956 to 1962, when he joined the Research Staff at the
IBM Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY. Upon retirement from IBM in 1991, he joined the Department of Electrical Engineering,
University of Rhode Island, Kingston, where he served on the faculty of the computer engineering program.