Daubechies has done some really cool work in math. She's probably best known in math for work in wavelet/image compression/signal processing and inverse problem

Daubechies has done some really cool work in math. She's probably best known in math for work in wavelet/image compression/signal processing and inverse problems. Here's an abstract for a talk that gives you a better idea of related work of hers bearing on both evolution/biology and art: https://www.ece.uw.edu/lytle/2012-ingrid-daubechies-lytle/ https://www.ece.uw.edu/lytle/2012-ingrid-daubechies-lytle/ Apparently this work on distance metrics can be applied to work backward from "mathematical distance between teeth" to "what did extinct animals eat?". It's interesting to watch her expand from traditional applied math (analysis) to increasing interaction with machine learning techniques. She's doing a lot with neural nets now, bringing this understanding of geometry and analysis to try to (for instance) reduce 'memorization' by neural nets and instead increase pattern recognition.