NEWS Mathematics People brought together previous studies and related them to Meyer, Daubechies, Tao, the analytical tools used in harmonic analysis. This dis- covery later led to Meyer’s demonstration that waves can and Candès Receive Princess form mutually independent sets of mathematical objects called orthogonal bases. His work inspired Daubechies of Asturias Award to construct orthogonal wavelets with compact support, Yves Meyer, Ingrid Daubechies, and later biorthogonal wavelets, which revolutionized the Terence Tao, and Emmanuel Candès field of engineering. Both worked on the development of have been named recipients of the wavelet packages, which allow improved adaptation to the 2020 Princess of Asturias Award for particularities of a signal or image. Technical and Scientific Research. “A second revolution in data and signal processing tech- According to the prize citation, they niques came in the first decade of the twenty-first century “have made immeasurable, ground- with the development of the theories of compressed sens- breaking contributions to modern ing or compressive sampling and matrix completion, fruit theories and techniques of mathe- of the collaboration between Terence Tao and Emmanuel Ingrid Daubechies matical data and signal processing. Candès. This work enables the efficient reconstruction of These constitute the foundations scattered data based on very few measurements. One of and backbone of the digital age (by the core issues in medical imaging and, in general, in all enabling the compression of graphic areas of signal processing is how to reconstruct a signal files with little loss of resolution), from partial, noisy measurements. Advanced reconstruction of medical imaging and diagnosis techniques, such as compressed sensing and matrix comple- (by enabling accurate images to be tion, enable the number of required samples to be reduced, reconstructed from a small number which in medical imaging means being able to examine the of data), and of engineering and sci- patient faster. … The compressed sensing technique has entific research (by eliminating inter- contributed significantly to signal processing by enabling ference and background noise). The the compressed version of a signal to be reconstructed using Terence Tao outstanding contributions of these a small number of linear measurements. This means a lower world leaders in mathematics to sampling frequency, less data, less use of storage resources, modern mathematical data and sig- decreased speed requirements for analog-to-digital con- nal processing are essentially based verters, and less time required for data transmission. These on two different yet complementary mathematical theories, developed by Meyer, Daubechies, tools: wavelets and compressed sens- Tao, and Candès, highlight the unifying and cross-cutting ing or matrix completion. role of mathematics in different scientific and engineering “Meyer and Daubechies have led disciplines, with practical solutions applicable in multiple the development of modern math- fields, as well as constituting an example of the usefulness ematical wavelet theory, located at of work in pure mathematics.” the overlap between mathematics, Yves Meyer earned his PhD from the University of Stras- Emmanuel Candès information technology, and com- bourg in 1966 under Jean-Pierre Kahane. He served as pro- puter science. Mathematical wavelet fessor of mathematics at Paris-Sud University (1966–1980), theory enables images and sounds to be decomposed into the Ecole Polytechnique (1980–1986), and Paris-Dauphine mathematical fragments, which capture irregularities in University (1986–1995). He was a senior researcher at the pattern, while at the same time being manageable. CNRS from 1995–1999, then joined the faculty at Ecole This technique underlies data compression and storage Normale Supérieure de Cachan. He has been professor and noise suppression. Together with Daubechies, Meyer emeritus at Cachan since 2004. Meyer is a member of the 434 NOTICES OF THE AMERICAN MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY VOLUME 68, NUMBER 3 Mathematics People NEWS French Academy of Science, the American Academy of Arts of Mathematics and Statistics, Professor of Electrical En- and Sciences (honorary), and the US National Academy of gineering, and codirector of the Data Science Institute. Sciences and is an Inaugural Fellow of the AMS. His honors His honors include the Alan T. Waterman Award (2006), include the Salem Prize (1970) and the Gauss Prize (2010). the James H. Wilkinson Prize in Numerical Analysis and He was awarded the Abel Prize in 2017. Scientific Computing (2005), the SIAM 2010 George Pólya Ingrid Daubechies received her PhD in 1980 from the Prize (with Terence Tao, 2010), the Collatz Prize (2011), Free University of Brussels, where she was employed until the Lagrange Prize in Continuous Optimization (2012), 1987. She spent much of 1986 visiting the Courant Institute the Dannie Heineman Prize (2013), and the George David of Mathematical Sciences. In 1987 she joined the AT&T Bell Birkhoff Prize (2015). He was awarded a MacArthur Genius Laboratories Mathematical Research Center, serving until Grant in 2017. He is a member of the US National Academy 1994, while concurrently holding a professorship in the De- of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences partment of Mathematics of Rutgers University. She became and a Fellow of the AMS. a professor in the Department of Mathematics at Princeton The Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Sci- University in 1994 and was director of the program in ap- entific Research recognizes “the work of fostering and plied and computational mathematics from 1997 to 2001. advancing research in the field of mathematics, astronomy She joined Duke University in 2011 and currently holds the and astrophysics, physics, chemistry, life sciences, medical James B. Duke Chair. Among her honors and awards are sciences, earth and space sciences or technological sciences, the AMS Leroy P. Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition including those disciplines corresponding to each of these (1994), the Satter Prize in Mathematics (1977), a MacAr- fields, as well as their related technologies.” The Princess thur Fellowship (1992), the National Academy of Sciences of Asturias Foundation is a nonprofit private institution Medal in Mathematics (2000), the Steele Prize for Seminal whose essential aims are to contribute to extolling and Contribution to Research (2011), the Benjamin Franklin promoting those scientific, cultural, and humanistic values Medal in Electrical Engineering (2011), the BBVA Founda- that form part of the universal heritage of humanity and tion Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Basic Sciences consolidate the existing links between the Principality of (with David Mumford, 2012), the Benter Prize in Applied Asturias and the title traditionally held by the heirs to the Mathematics (2018), and the Fudan-Zhongzhi Science Crown of Spain. The prize carries a cash award of 50,000 Award (2018). She is the first woman awarded the Nem- euros (approximately US$60,600). mers Prize in Mathematics (2012). She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the US National —From a Princess of Asturias Foundation announcement Academy of Sciences, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the London Mathematical Society, and the Paris Academy of Sato Awarded Sciences. She is a Fellow of the Association for Women in Operator Algebra Prize Mathematics and an Inaugural Fellow of the AMS. Terence Tao earned his PhD in mathematics from Prince- Yasuhiko Sato of Kyushu University ton University in 1996. He joined the faculty of the Univer- has been awarded the sixth Operator sity of California at Los Angeles, where he is currently full Algebra Prize for his outstanding professor. He was awarded a Fields Medal in 2006. Among contributions to the classification his many honors and awards are the Salem Prize (2000), theory of amenable C*-algebras and the Boˆcher Prize (2002), the Ostrowski Prize (with Ben group actions on them. The prize Green, 2005), the Levi L. Conant Prize (2005), a MacArthur consists of a cash award of approxi- Fellowship (2006), the SASTRA Ramanujan Prize (2006), mately US$3,000, a prize certificate, the Alan T. Waterman Award (2008), the Nemmers Prize and a medal. (2010), the Polya Prize (with Emmanuel Candès, 2010), Yasuhiko Sato The Operator Algebra Prize is and the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics (2014). He is awarded every four years to a person a member of the Australian Academy of Science, the US under forty years of age, either of Japanese nationality or National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy principally based in a Japanese institution, for outstanding of Arts and Sciences and an Inaugural Fellow of the AMS. contributions to operator algebra theory and related areas. Emmanuel Candès earned his PhD in statistics from Stanford University in 1998. He has held positions as pro- —Yasuyuki Kawahigashi, Chair fessor of applied and computational mathematics and Ron- Operator Algebra Prize Committee ald and Maxine Linde Professor at the California Institute of Technology. In 2009, he joined the faculty at Stanford University, where he is currently Barnum-Simon Professor MARCH 2021 NOTICES OF THE AMERICAN MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY 435 Mathematics People NEWS Chatterjee Awarded 2020 Fudan–Zhongzhi Infosys Prize Science Award Sourav Chatterjee of Stanford Uni- Three physicists whose work involves the mathematical versity has