Mathematician Ingrid Daubechies’ work in signal processing helped make our electronic world possible — and she cleared a path for women in the field.

A professor at Duke University, in Durham, N.C., Daubechies’ métier is figuring out optimal ways to represent and analyze images and information. The great mathematical discovery of her early career, made in 1987 when she was 33, was the “Daubechies wavelet.” Her work, together with further wavelet developments, was instrumental to the invention of image-compression algorithms, like the JPEG2000, that pervade the digital age.

One mathematician refers to the talents of her former adviser by describing Daubechies as ‘the Meryl Streep of mathematics.’

Wavelets are versatile mathematical tools that can be thought of as a zoom lens, making it possible to spotlight the information that matters most in an image. Wavelets can enable computers to provide greater resolution — functioning, in a sense, as human eyes naturally do, seeing more detail at the focal point and leaving the rest of the view comparatively blurry.

You can read much more in an in-depth article in the NY Times