Ingrid Daubechies

Born on 17 August 1954 in Houthalen, a small coal-mining town in Belgium, Ingrid Daubechies is a mathematician best known for her work with wavelets. After earning both her BS and PhD in physics from the Free University of Brussels, Daubechies spent two years in the US doing postdoctoral research before returning to Belgium to teach at her alma mater. In 1987 she took a job at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey. Interested in mathematics and its applications, she focused on wavelet transforms , which involve integrating a product of a signal and an oscillating function. Her research has found many applications, including authenticating paintings via high-resolution scans, analyzing seismographs, and compressing data, particularly digital images. In 1993 she took a position at Princeton University, where she later became the first woman full professor of mathematics, and in 2010 she became the first woman president of the International Mathematical Union. Since 2011, she has been at Duke University, where she serves as the James B. Duke Professor of Mathematics. Daubechies has been honored with numerous prizes and awards, including the 1994 American Mathematical Society Steele Prize for Exposition for her book Ten Lectures on Wavelets, the 2000 National Academy of Sciences Award in Mathematics, and the 2012 Frederic Esser Nemmers Prize in Mathematics. In 1993 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 1998, to the US National Academy of Sciences.

Date in History: 17 August 1954