Ingrid Daubechies | Biography

Ingrid Daubechies was born August 17, 1954, in Houthalen, Belgium. Her father, Marcel Daubechies, is a retired civil engineer and her mother, Simone, is a retired criminologist. Daubechies credits her parents with giving her a love of learning and her mother with teaching her by example to be her own person. Her father always encouraged her to pursue her interest in science. She has one brother.

As a small child, Daubechies displayed an insatiable interest in how things worked and in making things with her hands. She took up the hobbies of weaving and pottery at a young age and continues to produce objets d'art in both crafts. At the age of eight or nine Daubechies' favorite hobby was to sew clothes for her dolls because it fascinated her that flat pieces of material could be worked into curved surfaces that fit the angles of the doll's body. But she also fascinated with machinery and mathematical axioms. Daubechies used to lie in bed and compute the powers of two, or test the mathematical law that any number divisible by nine produces another number divisible by nine when the digits are added together. Reading has been a lifelong hobby.

Daubechies spent her entire childhood and school years in Belgium. She was educated at the Free University Brussels, earning a B.S. degree in 1975 and a Ph.D. in 1980, both in physics. Her thesis was entitled "Representation of Quantum Mechanical Operators by Kernels on Hilbert Spaces of Analytic Functions." Between 1978 and 1980 Daubechies wrote ten articles based on her own original research. While pursuing her own studies, she taught at the Free University Brussels a total of 12 years. Daubechies first visited the United States in 1981, staying for two years, then returned to Belgium believing she would not come back to America.

In 1984, Daubechies was the recipient of the Louis Empain Prize for physics. The prize is given every five years to a Belgian scientist for scientific contributions done before the age of 29. She returned to the United States in 1987 and joined AT&T Bell Laboratories, where she was a technical staff member for the Mathematics Research Center. During her employment with AT&T, she concurrently took leaves of absences to teach at the University of Michigan and later at Rutgers University. In 1993, Daubechies became a full professor at Princeton University in the Mathematics Department and Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics, where she has remained to date. Daubechies is the first woman to obtain this position at Princeton. Her responsibilities include teaching both undergraduate and graduate courses, directing Ph.D. students in thesis work, and collaborating with postdoctoral fellows in research. She has also devoted much time to creating mathematics curriculums for grades kindergarten through 12th grade that reflect present-day applications of mathematics.

Daubechies' original intent was to become a physicist (particularly in the field of engineering). But she involved in mathematical work which was very theoretical in nature. She soon found herself caught up in mathematical applications. Her designation as a mathematician was sealed through her brilliant and innovative work in wavelet theory.

In 1987, Daubechies made one of the biggest breakthroughs in wave analysis in the past two hundred years. Prior to the development of Daubechies' theorem, signal processing was accomplished by using French mathematician Jean-Baptiste Fourier's series of trigonometric functions, breaking down the signal into combinations of sine waves. Sine waves can measure the amplitude and frequency of a signal, but they can't measure both at the same time. Daubechies changed all that when she discovered a way to break signals down into wavelets instead of breaking them down into their components; a task thought by most mathematicians to be impossible.

This discovery has changed the image-processing techniques used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for transmitting and retrieving the information contained in their massive database of fingerprints. With more than 200 million fingerprints on file, the technique also allows for data compression without loss of information, and eliminates extraneous data that slows or clutters the procedure. Of more significance to Daubechies is the application of her discovery to the field of biomedicine. She likens a wavelets transform to "a musical score which tells the musician which note to play at what time," and this is of particular importance to medical science. Through the analysis of signals used in electrocardiograms, electroencephalograms, and other processes used in medical imaging, the medical world hopes to employ Daubechies' development to detect disease and abnormalities in patients much sooner than is presently possible. The development and implementation of wavelet imagery in medicine would improve the ability of an ECG from a simple recording of a heartbeat to a digitized record of complete heart function.

Other applications for wavelets still in the research stage include video and speech compression, sound enhancement, statistical analysis, and partial differential equations involving shock waves and turbulence, to name only a few.

Daubechies' work has not gone unnoticed by her peers. She has been a fellow of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation from 1992 to 1997 and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1993. She was the recipient of the American Mathematical Steele Prize for Exposition for her "Ten Lectures on Wavelets" in 1994, and received the Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize in 1997. Daubechies is also a member of the American Mathematical Society, the Mathematical Association of America, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Daubechies has written more than 70 articles and papers during her career, more than 20 of them dealing with the nature, application, and interdisciplinary use of wavelets. She has held memberships in more than 17 professional organizations and committees, including her current memberships with the United States National Committee on Mathematics and the European Mathematical Society's Commission on the Applications of Mathematics. Daubechies has been a guest editor or member of the editorial board for ten professional journals and has served as editor-in-chief for the publication Applied and Computation Harmonic Analysis.

Daubechies married A. Robert Calderbank, a mathematician, in 1987 and has two children.