Ingrid Daubechies (born August 17, 1954) (approximate pronunciation "Dobe-uh-shee") is a Belgian physicist and mathematician. She is best known for her work with wavelets in image compression.

Biography

Daubechies was born in Houthalen, Belgium, as the daughter of a civil engineer and a criminologist. Daubechies completed her undergraduate studies in physics at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in 1975. She continued her research at that institution as an assistant researcher until 1984, when she assumed the title of assistant professor.

In 1987 Daubechies moved to the United States, taking a position at one of AT&T Bell Laboratories' New Jersey facilities. Here, she met mathematician Robert Calderbank, former vice president for research and Internet and network systems at AT&T Labs, whom she married in 1987. In that same year, she made her best-known discovery: the construction of compactly supported continuous wavelets.

Since 1993, Daubechies has been a full professor at Princeton University. At Princeton, she is the lead math professor for the new integrated Engineering-Math-Physics (EMP) program (EGR 191-192-193-194).

Well-known results

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.

Major awards

* Louis Empain Prize for Physics (1984)
* Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition (1994)
* Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize in Mathematics (1997)
* IEEE Information Theory Society Golden Jubilee Award for Technological Innovation (1998)
* Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) (1998)
* NAS Award in Mathematics (2000)
* Noether Lecturer (2006)

References

* Ingrid Daubechies: Ten Lectures on Wavelets, SIAM 1992.

Links

* Ingrid Daubechies at the Mathematics Genealogy Project

* O'Connor, John J; Edmund F. Robertson "Ingrid Daubechies". MacTutor History of Mathematics archive.

* Ingrid Daubechies' homepage at Princeton University