Baroness Ingrid Daubechies ( doh-bə-SHEE; French: [dobʃi]; born 17 August 1954) is a Belgian-American physicist and mathematician at Duke University. She is best known for her work with wavelets in image compression. Daubechies is recognized for her study of the mathematical methods that enhance image-compression technology. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a 1992 MacArthur Fellow. She also served on the Mathematical Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize from 2011 to 2013. 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. Her research involves the use of automatic methods from both mathematics, technology, and biology to extract information from samples such as bones and teeth. She also developed sophisticated image processing techniques used to help establish the authenticity and age of some of the world's most famous works of art, including paintings by Vincent van Gogh and Rembrandt. Daubechies is on the board of directors of Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education (EDGE), a program that helps women entering graduate studies in the mathematical sciences. She was the first woman to be president of the International Mathematical Union (2011–2014). She became a member of the Academia Europaea in 2015.
Early life and education Daubechies was born in Houthalen, Belgium, as the daughter of Simonne Duran (a criminologist) and Marcel Daubechies (a civil mining engineer). She remembers that when she was a little girl and could not sleep, she did not count numbers, as one would expect from a 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, such as cone and tetrahedron, were familiar to her before she reached the age of six. She excelled at the primary school and was moved up a grade after only three months. After completing the Lyceum in Hasselt, she entered the Vrije Universiteit Brussel at age 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 PhD in theoretical physics in 1980 at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
Career After completing her doctorate, Daubechies 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). Daubechies spent most of 1986 as a guest-researcher at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in New York. 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 Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. In 1988, she published the result of her research on orthonormal bases of compactly supported wavelets in Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics. In 1991, Daubechies was appointed as a professor at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, where she taught in their mathematics department. She remained there through 1994. Daubechies moved to Princeton University in 1994, where she was active within the program in applied and computational mathematics. In 2004, she was named as the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor there. She was the first woman to become a full professor of mathematics at Princeton. In January 2011, Daubechies moved to Duke University to serve as the James B. Duke Professor in the department of mathematics and electrical and computer engineering at Duke University. In 2016, she and Heekyoung Hahn founded Duke Summer Workshop in Mathematics (SWIM) for rising high school seniors who were female. In 2020 and 2021 Daubechies, along with fiber artist Dominique Ehrmann, led a team of mathematicians and artists who collectively built the touring art and math installation known as Mathemalchemy.
Mathematical skills applied to fine art Daubechies has used mathematical techniques on multiple art restoration projects. Her team worked on restoring the Ghent Altarpiece, a massive fifteenth-century work of art consisting of 12 panels that are attributed to the brothers Hubert and Jan van Eyck. Daubechies and several colleagues developed new mathematical techniques to both reverse the effects of aging upon the artworks and untangle and remove the effects of past ill-fated conservation efforts. Using highly precise photographs and X-rays of the panels as well as various filtering methods, the team of mathematicians found an automatic way to detect the cracks caused by aging. They also were able to decipher the apparent text of the polyptych, which was attributed to Thomas Aquinas. Daubechies and her collaborators also contributed to the restoration of the fourteenth-century Saint John Altarpiece by Francescuccio Ghissi in the North Carolina Museum of Art, applying some of the techniques they discovered working on the Ghent Altarpiece restoration. With this project the mathematicians used machine-learning algorithms to separate features.
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