Daubechies is recognized for her study of the mathematical methods that enhance image-compression technology. She is a member of theNational Academy of Engineering,[2] the National Academy of Sciences[3] and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[4] She is a1992 MacArthur Fellow. She also served on the Mathematical Sciences jury for theInfosys Prize from 2011 to 2013.
The name Daubechies is widely associated with the orthogonalDaubechies wavelet and the biorthogonalCDF wavelet. A wavelet from this family of wavelets is now used in theJPEG 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.[5] 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 byVincent van Gogh andRembrandt.[6]
Daubechies was born inHouthalen, Belgium, as the daughter of Simonne Duran (a criminologist) and Marcel Daubechies (a civil mining engineer).[9] 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 ofexponential growth. Her parents found out that mathematical conceptions, such ascone andtetrahedron, 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 theLyceum inHasselt,[10] she entered theVrije Universiteit Brussel at age 17.[11]
Daubechies completed her undergraduate studies in physics at theVrije Universiteit Brussel in 1975. During the next few years, she visited the CNRS Center for Theoretical Physics inMarseille several times, where she collaborated withAlex Grossmann; this work was the basis for her doctorate inquantum mechanics.[11] She obtained her PhD intheoretical physics in 1980 at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.[12]
After completing her doctorate, Daubechies continued her research career at theVrije 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).[13]
In 1991, Daubechies was appointed as a professor atRutgers University inNew Brunswick, where she taught in their mathematics department.[12] She remained there through 1994.
Daubechies moved toPrinceton University in 1994, where she was active within the program in applied and computational mathematics. In 2004, she was named as theWilliam R. Kenan, Jr. Professor there.[16] She was the first woman to become a full professor of mathematics at Princeton.[6]
In January 2011, Daubechies moved toDuke University to serve as theJames B. Duke Professor in the department of mathematics and electrical and computer engineering at Duke University.[17] In 2016, she and Heekyoung Hahn[18] founded Duke Summer Workshop in Mathematics (SWIM) for rising high school seniors who were female.[19][20]
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 asMathemalchemy.[21]
Daubechies has used mathematical techniques on multiple art restoration projects. Her team worked on restoring theGhent Altarpiece, a massive fifteenth-century work of art consisting of 12 panels that are attributed to the brothersHubert andJan 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 toThomas Aquinas.
Daubechies and her collaborators also contributed to the restoration of the fourteenth-century Saint John Altarpiece byFrancescuccio Ghissi in theNorth Carolina Museum of Art, applying some of the techniques they discovered working on theGhent Altarpiece restoration. With this project the mathematicians used machine-learning algorithms to separate features.[22]
Daubechies received the Louis Empain Prize for Physics in 1984. It is awarded once every five years to a Belgian scientist on the basis of work done before the age of 29.[23]
Daubechies gave theGauss Lecture of theGerman Mathematical Society in 2015.[45] TheSimons Foundation, a private foundation based in New York City that funds research in mathematics and the basic sciences, gave Daubechies the Math + X Investigator award, which provides money to professors at American and Canadian universities to encourage new partnerships between mathematicians and researchers in other fields of science.[7] She was the one to suggest toSimons that the foundation should fund better mechanisms for interpreting existing data, rather than new research.[46] Also in 2015, Daubechies was elected a member of theNational Academy of Engineering for "contributions to the mathematics and applications of wavelets".[2]
In 2018, Daubechies won the William Benter Prize inApplied Mathematics fromCity University of Hong Kong (CityU). She is the first woman to be the recipient of the award. Prize officials cited the pioneering work of Daubechies inwavelet theory and her "exceptional contributions to a wide spectrum of scientific and mathematical subjects" and noted that "her work in enabling the mobile smartphone revolution is truly symbolic of the era".[47] Also in 2018, Daubechies was awarded the Fudan-Zhongzhi Science Award ($440,000) for her work on wavelets.[48]
In 2023, she was awarded theWolf Prize in Mathematics "for work in wavelet theory and applied harmonic analysis”.[55] She was the first woman to receive this award.[56]
Daubechies has been awarded The Bakerian Medal and Lecture 2025 for her work on wavelets and image compression and her exceptional contributions to a wide spectrum of physical, technological, and mathematical applications.[59]
In 1985, Daubechies met mathematicianRobert Calderbank when he was on a three-month exchange visit from Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey to the Brussels-based mathematics division ofPhilips Research. They married in 1987.[61] They have two children, Michael Calderbank and Carolyn Calderbank.[61]
^"Member Search".www.nasonline.org.Archived from the original on 4 April 2019. Retrieved26 January 2019.
^"Ingrid Chantal Daubechies".American Academy of Arts & Sciences. 3 January 2024.Archived from the original on 31 August 2021. Retrieved5 January 2024.
^"2018 Fudan-Zhongzhi Science Award presented to Professor Ingrid Daubechies". Duke University. 2018. Retrieved25 February 2020.The 2018 Fudan-Zhongzhi Science Award has been awarded to Ingrid Daubechies, James B. Duke Professor of Mathematics and Electrical and Computer Engineering. The award is presented for her remarkable contributions to wavelets, especially the orthogonal Daubechies wavelet and the biorthogonal CDF (Cohen-Daubechies-Feauveau) wavelet
^Daubechies, Ingrid (October 1988). "Orthonormal bases of compactly supported wavelets".Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics.41 (7):909–996.doi:10.1002/cpa.3160410705.
^Daubechies, Ingrid; DeVore, Ronald; Fornasier, Massimo; Güntürk, C. Si̇nan (January 2010). "Iteratively reweighted least squares minimization for sparse recovery".Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics.63 (1):1–38.arXiv:0807.0575.doi:10.1002/cpa.20303.S2CID7726508.
I. Daubechies,A Different Way to Look at Subband Coding, NJIT Symposium on Multi-Resolution Signal Decomposition Techniques: Wavelets, Subbands and Transforms, April 1990.
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