Julia Robinson

Julia Hall Bowman Robinson
Born	December 8, 1919 St. Louis, Missouri, United States
Died	July 30, 1985 Oakland, California, United States
Citizenship	American
Fields	Mathematician
Alma mater	University of California, Berkeley
Doctoral advisor	Alfred Tarski
Known for	Diophantine equations Decidability
Influenced	Yuri Matiyasevich
Notable awards	Noether Lecturer MacArthur Fellow

Julia Hall Bowman Robinson (December 8, 1919 – July 30, 1985) was an American mathematician, born in St. Louis, Missouri. She completed her undergraduate and graduate degrees at University of California, Berkeley, receiving the doctorate in 1948. In 1976, Robinson was elected as the first female member of the mathematical division of the National Academy of Sciences. In 1982 she was selected to be a Noether Lecturer. In 1983 she was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. In addition, she was the first woman president of the American Mathematical Society. She died in Oakland, California of leukemia at the age of 65.

She is best known for her work on Diophantine equations and decidability which provided much of the ground work for the negative solution of Hilbert's tenth problem by Yuri Matiyasevich. In fact Robinson only strayed from this topic twice. The first was her thesis on effective solvability and unsolvability of mathematical problems. The second was in game theory where she proved that the fictitious play dynamics converges to the mixed strategy Nash equilibrium in two-player zero-sum games.

She married the mathematician Raphael Robinson in 1941. Her older sister, Constance Reid, is a well-known mathematical biographer.

[edit] Further reading

Reid, Constance (1997). Julia: A Life in Mathematics. Mathematical Association of America. ISBN 0-88385-520-8.

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