Celebratio Mathematica

Ingrid Daubechies

Behind the scenes of the wavelet revolution:
Ingrid Daubechies’ letters to Yves Meyer

The let­ters of In­grid Daubech­ies to Yves Mey­er were scanned, tran­scribed and trans­lated as a spe­cial pro­ject of Math­em­at­ic­al Sci­ences Pub­lish­ers (MSP) with sup­port from the Math­em­at­ic­al Sci­ences Re­search In­sti­tute (MSRI).

Pro­jects like this are a rare op­por­tun­ity to con­sider the “think­ing be­hind the the­or­ies”, and we are grate­ful to In­grid Daubech­ies and Yves Mey­er for their gen­er­os­ity in shar­ing this cor­res­pond­ence with the math­em­at­ic­al com­munity. To learn more about the gen­es­is of this pro­ject, see the ed­it­or’s fore­word. The story of the cor­res­pond­ence it­self and its in­tel­lec­tu­al con­text are laid out in Mey­er’s de­tailed in­tro­duc­tion.

Read­ers can ac­cess the let­ters in any of three ways:

  • here dir­ectly on the Cel­eb­ra­tio web­site in chro­no­lo­gic­al or­der (Eng­lish ap­pears first, fol­lowed by the French tran­scrip­tion);
  • as scans of the holo­graph ori­gin­als (via the “PDF ver­sion” links that ap­pear at the start of each page of tran­scrip­tions on this site); or
  • as a freest­and­ing elec­tron­ic book, en­titled Be­hind the scenes of the wave­let re­volu­tion: In­grid Daubech­ies’ let­ters to Yves Mey­er (via the “PDF ver­sion” link at right and be­low on this page). The book con­tains Mey­er’s in­tro­duc­tion and the en­tire se­quence of let­ters, with Eng­lish and French texts on fa­cing pages for the read­er’s con­veni­ence. A list of ref­er­ences is also in­cluded.

Sheila New­bery
Man­aging Ed­it­or

In this Chapter: