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The mathematician that revolutionized digital cinema
Ingrid Daubechies is originally a physicist, born
in Belgium in 1954.
Her father, a mining engineer, always encouraged her to continue developing her interest in
science. She always liked mathematics since
studying it at school; however, she studied to
be physicist and devoted herself to the development of new mathematics for theoretical
physics and applications in engineering.
Ingrid Daubechies liked to devise new approaches to solve mathematical problems. One
of her major contributions is the wavelet theory,
without which detecting gravitational waves
would have been impossible and imagining
diagnosis would be much slower. There would
also be no digital cinema as we know it, no
DVDs, no Netflix and no live football matches in
high resolution. Her theory has many other
applications in our daily life, such as in the
prevention of earthquakes or tumours, in the
study of meteorology, DNA or blood analysis.
The Daubechies Wavelet is the basis of the
JPEG 2000 image compression system. "High
compression standard JPEG images look
terrible. On
the other hand, with JPEG 2000 images
are degraded with much more grace.” For
this reason, it is ideal for transferring large
amounts of visual information without losing
quality; It is the basis of the digital cinema.
Daubechies has received many awards,
among them the Nemmers Prize in Mathematics and the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of
Knowledge in Basic Sciences Prize. She was
also the first female president of the International Mathematical Union.
She currently works as a professor at the
University of Princeton.