Mathematician / Physicist
She was intrigued by numbers since childhood.
FAMILY BACKGROUND
ID’s father was a civil engineer (civil engineering deals with design, construction, and maintenance of the built environment). Her mother dropped out of college to be a homemaker and mother but after the children were more independent, she returned to college, studied criminology, and commenced a career as a youth protection counselor.
CHILDHOOD INTERESTS CONSISTENT WITH EVENTUAL CAREER
Since childhood, ID had been intrigued by mathematical truths – when she couldn’t fall asleep, she computed the powers of two in her head. Despite her interest in math, she planned to study engineering – no doubt influenced by her father’s career, but she loved to make things, including patterns for her dolls’ clothing, transforming flat material into three-dimensional creations. And she was always interested in how things worked.
ONE SHORT GLIMPSE OF A REAL-WORLD WORKSITE ALTERED A CAREER PATH
During a class visit to a civil-engineering department, the concrete constructions undergoing durability testing seemed to ID like a “glorified Ikea.” So, she switched to physics (the study of matter and its motion, along with related concepts such as energy and force.)
A PARENT’S DISMAY DID NOT DETER A CAREER CHOICE
When ID’s mother heard of ID’s altered career choice, her mother was aghast: “Physics! Engineering is a profession. Physics is like being an artist.”
ADVISER’S ENTHUSIASM INFLUENCES A STUDENT’S CAREER
The study of physics requires a lot of math classes. One of her academic advisers teamed with another physicist to use techniques from quantum mechanics to study seismic traces, being the wavy curves plotted by a seismograph. They coined the term “wavelet” (from a French word “ondelette”, meaning small wave). ID became swept up in her adviser’s enthusiasm for tackling a new topic and forging a technique that led to the new paradigm: wavelet theory. (A paradigm is a typical example or a pattern of something, a model; an example within a sentence: “There is a new paradigm for public art in this country.”)
(Sidebar regarding waves: In mathematics, waves are fundamental and ubiquitous. The sine wave is a smooth, periodic undulation, a mathematical idealization of waves found in nature; energetic seismic waves are produced by earthquakes, sonic booms and tsunamis spreading across water.) ID notes that “You can build almost anything by combining, in clever ways, waves of different wavelengths.”
The study of wavelets has real world implications: The F.B.I. deploys wavelets to digitize its fingerprint database. A wavelet-inspired algorithm was used in the animation of films like “A Bug’s Life.”
CAREER CHALLENGE: SELF DOUBT AND DEPRESSION
While ID was achieving academic success and professional respect, at times during her career she worried about being “a complete fake.” She still considers herself an oddball as a mathematician. “I came out of left field” – she trained as a physicist before migrating into mathematics. “And I think there are people who feel left field is where I belong.” She doesn’t mind. She revels in finding meaningful and practical problems – and solutions – where other mathematicians assume there are none. Indeed, she puzzles over any problem she can find, and she is always game to take on the problems of others as well.
A computer scientist who was a former PH.D. student of ID noted: “When you’re in the depths of despair because your project has crashed and burned and you have almost proven that what you’re trying to do is impossible, ID comes along and pulls you out of the pit of doom and you can keep going.”
Despite her many career successes, ID was sometimes incapacitated by insecurities – occasionally she could barely get out of bed. At age 40, after a difficult period, she found help and was finally diagnosed with chronic depression, having suffered dark episodes since puberty. Through therapy and medication, she found a manageable equilibrium. “When I’m busy and happy, I feel I don’t need the medication. But it’s always a bad idea to skip it” because within a day, she starts sliding into depressive thoughts. She doesn’t mind talking about depression, in part because she believes it’s good for people to know that success doesn’t inoculate against mental-health vulnerabilities and that it’s a chronic problem requiring chronic solving. “It’s actually never really solved, which is the case with many, many things.” She likens it to bicycling: “You have to compensate all the time.”
CAREER CHALLENGE: PHYSICAL DISABILITY (IMPERFECT EYESIGHT)
ID has a “lazy right eye and her left eye isn’t great either.”
Ironically, ID is known for her study of the way digital images strive to capture our reality with exaggerated simplifications, reducing what we see in the world to its essential features through pixel proxies and other mathematical manipulations. Wavelets can enable computers to provide greater resolution – functioning, in a sense, as human eyes naturally do, seeing more detail at the focus point and leaving the rest of the view comparatively blurry.
CAREER ACCOMPLISHMENTS FOR HERSELF AND FOR HER GENDER
ID has sought out all sorts of ways to engage in the digital transformation of society. She has done key research studying analog-to-digital conversion technology and through many collaborations, she has brought her mathematical insights to areas of study including internet traffic, evolutionary morphology (analyzing data collected from lemur teeth and bones) and electrocardiogram abnormalities.
In 1993, ID was appointed to the faculty of an Ivy League university, the first woman to become full professor in the mathematics department. She was lured by the prospect of mingling with historians and sociologists and their ilk, not only electrical engineers, and mathematicians. She designed a course called “Math Alive” aimed at non-math and non-science majors and gave talks for the general public on “Surfing with Wavelets: A New Approach to Analyzing Sound and Images.”
ID has since joined another prestigious University, where she is both a professor and Director of the school’s International Mathematical Union – another female first. Following many professional accolades, England’s Cambridge University tried to lure her to their faculty, but her current University countered with a guarantee to fund recruiting and hiring of female mathematicians until they made up 30 percent of the faculty. (At universities with the highest mathematics research classification, women constitute about 30 percent of math Ph.D. students, but only about 17 percent of the tenured or tenure-track faculty.)
