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:

• Louis Empain Prize for Physics (1984)


• Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition (1994)


• Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize in Mathematics (1997)


• IEEE Information Theory Society Golden Jubilee Award for Technological Innovation (1998)


• Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) (1998)

• NAS Award in Mathematics (2000)


• Noether Lecturer (2006)

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!