Julia Robinson

Infobox Scientist
name = Julia Hall Bowman Robinson
box_width =


imagesize = 200px
caption = Julia Robinson in 1975
birth_date = December 8, 1919
birth_place = St. Louis, Missouri, United States
death_date = July 30, 1985
death_place = Oakland, California, United States
residence =
citizenship = American
nationality = United States
ethnicity =
field = Mathematician
work_institutions = University of California, Berkeley
alma_mater = University of California, Berkeley
doctoral_advisor = Alfred Tarski
doctoral_students =
known_for = Diophantine equations
Decidability
author_abbrev_bot =
author_abbrev_zoo =
influences =
influenced = Yuri Matiyasevich
prizes = Noether Lecturer
MacArthur Fellow
religion =
footnotes =

Julia Hall Bowman Robinson (December 8, 1919 – July 30, 1985) was an American mathematician, born in St. Louis, Missouri. She is best known for her work on decision problems and Hilbert's Tenth Problem.

Background and education

Robinson was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the daughter of Ralph Bowers Bowman and Helen (Hall) Bowman.cite encyclopedia
last = Feferman
first = Solomon
authorlink = Solomon Feferman
encyclopedia = Biographical Memoirs
title = Julia Bowman Robinson, 1919–1985
url = http://books.nap.edu/html/biomems/jrobinson.pdf
accessdate = 2008-06-18
year = 1994
publisher = National Academy of Sciences
volume =63
location = Washington, DC
isbn =978-0-309-04976-4
pages = 452–479] Rp|454Her older sister is the mathematical popularizer and biographer Constance Reid. The family moved to Arizona and then to San Diego when the girls were a few years old.cite book
last= Reid
first= Constance
title= Julia: A life in mathematics
year= 1996
publisher=Mathematical Association of America
location=Washington, DC
isbn=0883855208]

She entered San Diego State University in 1936 and transferred as a senior to University of California, Berkeley in 1939. She received her AB degree in 1940 and continued in graduate studies. Rp|454–455 She married Berkeley professor Raphael Robinson in 1941. Rp|455 She received the Ph.D. degree in 1948 under Alfred Tarski with a disseration on "Definability and Decision Problems in Arithmetic". Rp|52

Her heart had been damaged by rheumatic fever as a child, and as an adult she suffered poor health and shortness of breath.Rp|7,43 In 1961 she underwent an operation to remove the scar tissue from her mitral valve. The operation was a success and she became much more active physically and took up bicycling for exercise. Rp|470

In 1975 she became a full professor at Berkeley, teaching quarter-time because she still did not feel strong enough for a full-time job. Rp|472

In 1984 she was diagnosed with leukemia. She underwent treatment and went into remission for a few months, but then the disease recurred and she died in Oakland, California on July 30, 1985. Rp|473 Rp|120

Work

Hilbert's tenth problem

Hilbert's tenth problem asks for an algorithm to determine whether a Diophantine equation has any solutions in integers. A series of results developed in the 1940s through 1970 by Robinson, Martin Davis, Hilary Putnam, and Yuri Matiyasevich resolved this problem in the negative; that is, they showed that no such algorithm can exist.

George Csicsery produced and directed a one-hour documentary about Robinson titled "Julia Robinson and Hilbert's Tenth Problem", that premiered at the Joint Mathematics Meeting in San Diego on January 7, 2008. "Notices of the American Mathematical Society" printed a film review [cite journal
last = Wood
first = Carol
year = 2008
month = May
title = Film Review: Julia Robinson and Hilbert's Tenth Problem
journal = Notices of the American Mathematical Society
volume = 55
issue = 5
pages = 573–575
publisher = American Mathematical Society
location = Providence, RI
issn = 00029920
url = http://www.ams.org/notices/200805/tx080500573p.pdf
format = PDF
accessdate = 2008-06-06 ] and an interview with the director. [cite journal
last = Casselman
first = Bill
year = 2008
month = May
title = Interview with George Csicsery
journal = Notices of the American Mathematical Society
volume = 55
issue = 5
pages = 576–578
publisher = American Mathematical Society
location = Providence, RI
issn = 00029920
url = http://www.ams.org/notices/200805/tx080500576p.pdf
format = PDF
accessdate = 2008-06-06 ]

Other decidability work

Her Ph.D. thesis was on "Definability and Decision Problems in Arithmetic". In it she showed that the theory of the rational numbers was undecidable by showing that elementary number theory could be defined in terms of the rationals, and elementary number theory was already known to be undecidable (this is Gödel's first Incompleteness Theorem). Rp|51

Other mathematical works

Robinson's work only strayed from decision problems twice. Rp|457 The first time was her first paper, published in 1948, on sequential analysis in statistics. The second was a 1951 paper in game theory where she proved that the fictitious play dynamics converges to the mixed strategy Nash equilibrium in two-player zero-sum games. This was posed as a prize problem at RAND with a $200 prize, but she did not receive the prize because she was a RAND employee at the time. Rp|59

Political work

Robinson was attracted to politics by the 1952 presidential campaign of Adlai Stevenson. (Stevenson was her husband's first cousin, but it was his ideas that attracted her and not the family connection.) In the 1950s Robinson was active in local Democratic party activities, and did less mathematics. She stuffed envelopes, rang doorbells, asked for votes, and so on. She was Alan Cranston's campaign manager in Contra Costa County when he ran for his first political office, state controller.Rp|64–65 cite journal
year = 1996
month = December
title = Being Julia Robinson's Sister
journal = Notices of the American Mathematical Society
volume = 43
issue = 12
pages = 1486–1492
publisher = American Mathematical Society
location = Providence, RI
issn = 00029920
url = http://www.ams.org/notices/199612/reid.pdf
format = PDF
accessdate = 2008-06-07 ] Rp|1488

Honors

* United States National Academy of Sciences elected 1975 (first woman mathematician elected Rp|vii)
* Noether Lecturer 1982 cite web
url= http://www.awm-math.org/noetherbrochure/Robinson82.html
title= Noether Brochure: Julia Robinson, Functional Equations in Arithmetic
accessdate= 2008-06-18
publisher= Association for Women in Mathematics]
* MacArthur Fellowship 1983
* President of American Mathematical Society 1983–1984 (first woman president Rp|vii)

Notes

External links

* [http://www.agnesscott.edu/lriddle/women/robinson.htm "Julia Bowman Robinson", Biographies of Women Mathematicians] , Agnes Scott College
*MacTutor Biography|id=Robinson_Julia
*MathGenealogy|id=32658
* [http://logic.pdmi.ras.ru/~yumat/JRobinson/index.html Julia Bowman Robinson on the Internet] ( [http://www.fmi.uni-stuttgart.de/ti/personen/Matiyasevich/JRobinson/index.html mirror] )

Persondata
NAME=Robinson, Julia
ALTERNATIVE NAMES=
SHORT DESCRIPTION=Mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH=December 8, 1919
PLACE OF BIRTH=St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.
DATE OF DEATH=July 30, 1985
PLACE OF DEATH= Oakland, California, United States