Ingrid Daubechies Named to Carnegie Foundation’s ‘Great Immigrants, Great Americans’

Ingrid Daubechies, James B. Duke Distinguished Professor Emerita of Mathematics, has been named to the Andrew Carnegie Foundation’s 2026 Class of Great Immigrants, Great Americans, recognizing 25 distinguished naturalized citizens whose contributions have strengthened America. The tribute, launched by Carnegie more than 20 years ago, is celebrated every Fourth of July. 

Daubechies was born in the small coal-mining town of Houthalen, Belgium. She earned a bachelor’s degree and Ph.D. in physics from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, before moving to the U.S. in 1987 to join the Mathematical Research Center at AT&T Bell Labs in New Jersey. 

“I was always interested in what makes things work,” she told The Wall Street Journal, “why things are that way and not other ways, and then you automatically come to mathematical questions.” 

Daubechies was nicknamed “The Godmother of the Digital Image” by The New York Times for her research on wavelet theory. Her work underlies much of today’s image processing technologies, including image compression and denoising. Anytime you go to a movie theater, each frame has been compressed using Daubechies’ wavelet-based method. 

Armed with her elegant math and unwavering curiosity, Daubechies spent much of her career defying disciplinary boundaries, weaving in and out of fields as disparate as art restoration and evolutionary biology. 

Her early work helped the FBI squeeze down millions of fingerprints in 1990s computers. She worked with geologists to peek under the Earth’s crust, analyzing seismograms from earthquakes; partnered with neuroscientists and cardiologists to read MRI images of brain activity and patterns in electrocardiograms; and collaborated with fossil experts, using one of her techniques to compare 3D shapes to analyze scans of bones and teeth to learn about an extinct animal’s diet or locomotion patterns. 

In another project, Daubechies and her team used wavelets and machine learning to distinguish forgeries from true works by Vincent van Gogh. The ensuing collaboration between mathematicians, computer scientists, museum curators and art historians has led to algorithms used to date and mathematically restore artwork that has cracked, faded, or been reduced to rubble by wartime bombing. 

A staunch advocate for women in mathematics, Daubechies has left a trail of firsts in her own right, including by becoming the first tenured female professor of mathematics at Princeton University, the first woman to receive the National Academy of Sciences Award in Mathematics, and the first woman to be awarded the Wolf Prize in Mathematics. She has also received a MacArthur Fellowship, the National Medal of Science, and in 2012, King Albert II of Belgium granted Daubechies the title of Baroness. 

A tribute to the legacy of Andrew Carnegie, Carnegie’s “Great Immigrants, Great Americans” initiative aims to increase public awareness of the economic and societal benefits of immigration. According to the American Immigration Council, there are 48 million immigrants in America, about half of whom are naturalized American citizens. Immigrants make up 14 percent of the U.S. population and account for 23.6 percent of entrepreneurs, 28.4 percent of health aides, and 23.6 percent of STEM workers. Fifty-nine percent of startups valued at $1 billion or more were founded or cofounded by immigrants, and 66 percent of billion-dollar companies in the U.S. were founded or cofounded by immigrants or the children of immigrants, according to a 2026 report by the National Foundation for American Policy.