This article is about the success story of a seemingly simple yet extremely powerful approach that has recently reached a celebrity status in statistical and engineering sciences. The hero of this story - bootstrap resampling - is relatively young, but the story itself is a familiar one within the scientific community: a mathematician or a statistician conceives and formulates a theory that is first developed by fellow mathematicians and then brought to fame by other professionals, typically engineers, who point to many applications that can benefit from just such an approach. Signal processing boasts some of the finest examples of such stories, such as the classic story of Fourier transforms or the more contemporary tale of wavelet transforms.