Daubechies

Today I had the great honor of meeting Ingrid Daubechies (Duke), who is a pioneering and accomplished mathematician, known for some of the fundamental work on wavelets and representations that have been incredibly important in data. For example, the JPEG standard is based on her wavelets! She gave a talk at the end of the day on teeth. Yes teeth. It turns out that the shapes of tooth surfaces tell you simultaneously about evolution and diet. And she has worked out beautiful ways to first get distances between surfaces. Like metric distances in surface space. And then join those distances up into local manifolds. It could have relevance to things we have been thinking about for a non-parametric version of The Cannon. It was a beautiful talk, with the theme or message that you do better in your science if you use mathematical tools that are matched well to the structure of your problem. That message is either obvious or deep. Or both! What a privilege to be there.