Ingrid Daubechies

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Ingrid Daubechies bigraphy, stories - physicist, mathematician

Ingrid Daubechies : biography

17 August 1954 –

Ingrid Daubechies ( born 17 August 1954) is a Belgian physicist and mathematician. She was between 2004 and 2011 the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor in the mathematics and applied mathematics departments at Princeton University. In January 2011 she moved to Duke University as a Professor in mathematics. She is the first woman president of the International Mathematical Union (2011–2014). She is best known for her work with wavelets in image compression.

Major awards

  • Louis Empain Prize for Physics (1984)
  • Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition (1994)
  • Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize in Mathematics (1997)
  • Golden Jubilee Award for Technological Innovation from the IEEE Information Theory Society (1998)
  • Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) (1998)
  • Basic Research Award, German Eduard Rhein Foundation (2000)
  • NAS Award in Mathematics (2000)
  • Emmy Noether Lecturer (2006)
  • 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship
  • IEEE Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal (2011)
  • Leroy P. Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research from the American Mathematical Society (2011)
  • Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering from the Franklin Institute (2011)
  • Fellow of the American Mathematical Society (2012), retrieved 2012-11-10.

Publications

Notes

Biography

Daubechies was born in Houthalen, Belgium, as the daughter of Marcel Daubechies (a civil mining engineer) and Simonne Duran (then a homemaker, later a criminologist). Ingrid remembers that when she was a small girl and could not sleep, she did not count numbers, as you would expect from a little child, but started to multiply numbers by two from memory. Thus, as a child, she already familiarized herself with the properties of exponential growth. Her parents found out that mathematical conceptions, like cone and tetrahedron, were familiar to her before she reached the age of 6. She excelled at the primary school, moved up a class after only 3 months. According to her parents she was able to derive the area of an ellipse by means of integral calculation at the age of 11. After completing the Lyceum in Turnhout she entered the Vrije Universiteit Brussel at 17. Daubechies completed her undergraduate studies in physics at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in 1975. During the next few years, she visited the CNRS Center for Theoretical Physics in Marseille several times, where she collaborated with Alex Grossmann; this work was the basis for her doctorate in quantum mechanics. She obtained her Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 1980, and continued her research career at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel until 1987, rising through the ranks to positions roughly equivalent with research assistant-professor in 1981 and research associate-professor 1985, funded by a fellowship from the NFWO (Nationaal Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek).

In 1985 Daubechies met mathematician Robert Calderbank, then on a 3-month exchange visit from AT&T Bell Laboratories, New Jersey to the Brussels-based mathematics division of Philips Research; they married in 1987, after Daubechies had spent most of 1986 as a guest-researcher at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. At Courant she made her best-known discovery: based on quadrature mirror filter-technology 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. In July 1987, Daubechies joined the Murray Hill AT&T Bell Laboratories’ New Jersey facility. In 1988 she published the result in Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics.I. Daubechies, , Comm. Pure & Appl. Math., 41 (7), pp. 909-996, 1988.

From 1994 to 2010, Daubechies was a professor at Princeton University, where she was active especially within the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics. She was the first female full professor of Mathematics at Princeton. In January 2011 she moved to Duke University to serve as a professor of Mathematics.