Ingrid Daubechies - The "Godmother of digital image" on the beauty of the world
Ingrid Daubechies is endlessly, irrepressibly, beautifully curious. She is a Belgian physicist and mathematician whose scientific achievements have rippled across society in all directions for the past 35 years. But, more than that, she's a fierce champion of diversity and equality, in math and science, in women's rights, in opportunity. To sit with Ingrid, her math and her life, is to illuminate our world and inspire us to imagine other worlds.
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Ingrid is the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Electrical and Computer Engineering. In 1987 she constructed compactly supported continuous wavelets that would require only a finite amount of processing, in this way enabling wavelet theory to enter the realm of digital signal processing. That family of wavelets are now named after her and have had profound societal impact, earning her the colloquial title the “Godmother of the Digital Image.”
You don't need to understand the mathematics to recognize what her discoveries have meant to the world. You only need to look at her recognitions and awards.
She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Her ground-breaking career has come with ceiling-shattering firsts: first woman to become a full professor of mathematics at Princeton University, the first woman to receive the National Academy of Sciences Award in Mathematics, first female president of the International Mathematical Union, and the first women to win the William Benter Prize in Applied Mathematics from City University of Hong Kong.
Her work has been recognized in a long list of awards, including Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships. In 2012, she became a baroness (a title granted by Belgium’s King Albert II). In 2019, she received an honorary degree from Harvard. Earlier this year she was awarded the Wolf Prize, one of the highest honors in all of mathematics.
Free University Brussels for her bachelor's and doctorate in Physics. She has been researcher at Bell Laboratories, and professor at Rutgers, Princeton, and now Duke.
To sit with Ingrid, her math and her life, is to illuminate our world and inspire us to imagine other worlds.