Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Ada Lovelace Day: Ingrid Daubechies

In honour of Ada Lovelace Day, I thought that I'd try to highlight a woman in science from my home country, The Netherlands. To be honest, I couldn't think of one, and also couldn't find a high profile one. This may very well be because I don't know enough, or because I didn't search enough, and do please feel free to correct me, as I sincerely would like to know.

So I moved my focus to our southern neighbours, and found a great example of a high profile female scientist: Ingrid Daubechies.

Her accomplishments are staggering: while she's mainly known in the field for her Daubechies wavelets and CDF wavelet (Cohen-Daubechies-Feauveau wavelets, of which one family is famously used in the JPEG 2000 compression), she has a Ph. D. in theoretical physics, was the first female full professor of Mathematics at Princeton -- where, I suppose, she still works today -- and has won a veritable slew of awards:

As wikipedia notes:

In 2000 Daubechies became the first woman to receive the National Academy of
Sciences (NAS) Award in Mathematics, presented every 4 years for excellence in
published mathematical research. The award honored her "for fundamental
discoveries on wavelets and wavelet expansions and for her role in making
wavelets methods a practical basic tool of applied mathematics."

I must apologise for not researching this further: typically, I made the pledge and on the day itself I find myself extremely busy. I may extend this post tomorrow.

UPDATE: there's a saying in Holland that goes: 'It's as if the Devil's playing with it'. Anyway, in a clash of synchronicity -- see me mentioning above that I couldn't come up with clear examples of Dutch women strong in science or technology -- Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant has an article about Suzan de Haan, who is the only female operations manager in charge of a drilling platform in the Dutch part of the North Sea offshore industry.

Article here (in Dutch). I'll translate some parts tomorrow as I'm running out of time today. But hey: I'm proud of Suzan de Haan, as this is a part of technology in which my day job is also closely related (we provide propulsion installations for such platforms), so I know how difficult her job is. Hat's off!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hello !.
might , probably curious to know how one can make real money .
There is no initial capital needed You may start to receive yields with as small sum of money as 20-100 dollars.

AimTrust is what you thought of all the time
The company represents an offshore structure with advanced asset management technologies in production and delivery of pipes for oil and gas.

Its head office is in Panama with offices everywhere: In USA, Canada, Cyprus.
Do you want to become a happy investor?
That`s your choice That`s what you really need!

I`m happy and lucky, I began to take up income with the help of this company,
and I invite you to do the same. It`s all about how to choose a correct companion utilizes your money in a right way - that`s it!.
I make 2G daily, and what I started with was a funny sum of 500 bucks!
It`s easy to start , just click this link http://oniqopaji.100megsfree5.com/awexem.html
and go! Let`s take this option together to get rid of nastiness of the life