Ingrid Daubechies is awarded an honorary degree by Harvard University

Duke Mathematics professor Ingrid Daubechies was one of nine to be awarded an honorary degree from Harvard University.

One of the world’s leading mathematicians, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, a MacArthur Fellow, and past president of the International Mathematical Union, Ingrid Daubechies is the James B. Duke Professor of Mathematics at Duke University.

Daubechies was born and educated in Belgium and moved to the U.S. in 1987. She came to Duke in 2011 after stints working for Bell Laboratories and then Princeton University, where she was a professor of mathematics. She is best known for her discovery and mathematical analysis of compactly supported wavelets, which are used in image compression, such as in JPEG 2000 for both lossless and lossy compression. Her book, “Ten Lectures on Wavelets,” won the Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition in 1994.

Daubechies’ current research focuses on the development of analytic and geometric tools for the comparison of surfaces, an understanding that is central to many scientific disciplines and to the construction of video animations and many medical and biological applications. She is also interested in improving secondary mathematics education in the U.S. and around the world, and in the stimulation of mathematics, science, and technology in developing countries.