Ingrid Daubechies - Biography

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). Daubechies completed her undergraduate studies in physics at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in 1975. She obtained her Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 1980, and continued her research career at that institution until 1987, rising through the ranks to positions roughly equivalent with research assistant-professor in 1981 and research associate-professor 1985.

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. Daubechies then moved to the United States, taking a position at the Murray Hill AT&T Bell Laboratories' New Jersey facility. Earlier that same year, she had made her best-known discovery: the construction of compactly supported continuous wavelets.

Since 1993, Daubechies has been a professor at Princeton University, where she is 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.

The name Daubechies is widely associated with

  • the orthogonal Daubechies wavelet
  • and the biorthogonal CDF wavelet. A wavelet from this family of wavelets is now used in the JPEG 2000 standard.

Read more about this topic:  Ingrid Daubechies

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