Ingrid Daubechies

Ingrid Daubechies was born in Houthalen, a small coal-mining town in Belgium. She earned her bachelor’s degree and a PhD in physics from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, before moving to the United States in 1987 to join the Mathematical Research Center at AT&T Bell Labs in New Jersey.

“I was always interested in what makes things work,” she told The Wall Street Journal, “why things are that way and not other ways, and then you automatically come to mathematical questions.”

Today, Daubechies is the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor Emerita of Mathematics at Duke University. Nicknamed “The Godmother of the Digital Image” by The New York Times, she is one of the pioneers of wavelets, mathematical tools that can spotlight the information that matters most in an image or signal without losing its quality. Wavelets are now widely used across science and engineering, including digital image compression, medical imaging, and even authenticating paintings via high-resolution scans.

A staunch advocate for women in mathematics, Daubechies has left a trail of firsts in her own right, including by becoming the first tenured female professor of mathematics at Princeton University, the first woman to receive the National Academy of Sciences Award in Mathematics, and the first woman to be awarded the Wolf Prize in Mathematics. She has also received a MacArthur Fellowship, and in 2012, King Albert II of Belgium granted Daubechies the title of Baroness.

Published June 2026