---
title: "List of inventions and discoveries by women"
chunk: 5/8
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_inventions_and_discoveries_by_women"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:51:34.164784+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

== Mathematics ==
Daubechies wavelet
Ingrid Daubechies introduced the Daubechies wavelet and contributed to the development of the CDF wavelet, important tools in image compression.
You can't hear the shape of a drum.
In 1966, Mark Kac asked whether the shape of a drum could be determined by the sound it makes (whether a Riemannian manifold is determined by the spectrum of its Laplace–Beltrami operator).  John Milnor observed that a theorem due to Witt implied the existence of a pair of 16-dimensional tori that have the same spectrum but different shapes. However, the problem in two dimensions remained open until 1992, when Carolyn S. Gordon with coauthors Webb and Wolpert, constructed a pair of regions in the Euclidean plane that have different shapes but identical eigenvalues (see figure on right).
Cauchy–Kovalevskaya theorem
In mathematics, the Cauchy–Kowalevski theorem (also written as the Cauchy–Kovalevskaya theorem) is the main local existence and uniqueness theorem for analytic partial differential equations associated with Cauchy initial value problems. A special case was proven by Augustin Cauchy (1842), and the full result by Sophia Kovalevskaya (1875).
Kovalevskaya top
In classical mechanics, the precession of a rigid body such as a top under the influence of gravity is not, in general, an integrable problem. There are however three (or four) famous cases that are integrable, the Euler, the Lagrange, and the Kovalevskaya top. The Kovalevskaya top is a special symmetric top with a unique ratio of the moments of inertia which satisfy the relation

  
    
      
        
          I
          
            1
          
        
        =
        
          I
          
            2
          
        
        =
        2
        
          I
          
            3
          
        
        ,
      
    
    {\displaystyle I_{1}=I_{2}=2I_{3},}
  