 What if we could see through the issues of everyday life, convert them into numbers, and have a computer find the solution? The research of Ingrid Daubechies is based on the abstraction of the mathematical problems underlying science, engineering, and finance, among other fields, and the subsequent study of a solution through analysis. Daubechies, a Belgian mathematician and physicist, has taught at Rutgers, Princeton, and Duke; she is also the first woman to lead the International Mathematical Union and be awarded the U.S. National Academy of Sciences Medal in mathematics. Daubechies pioneered the use of wavelets as a mathematical tool to extract and store information from diverse data sets, like audio signals and images—and in this video of a 2011 Falling Walls Conference, she shares her latest successes in perfecting the conversion from analog to digital signaling and elaborating reversible algorithms in the fields of geophysics, biology, and art history. (17 minutes)
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