Julia Robinson (1919-1985)

Julia Robinson will be most remembered for her contributions to the solution of Hilbert's Tenth Problem, a problem which asked if there was an algorithm that would solve all Diophantine equations. She received many honors for her work which was on the borderline of logic and number theory:

In 1975 she was the first woman mathematician elected to the National Academy of the Sciences.
In 1980 she delivered the AMS Colloquium Lectures.
In 1983 she was chosen to be a MacArthur fellow
In 1975 was elected to be the first woman president of the AMS.

Julia Robinson is an excellent subject for a biography. A good deal has been written about her life, so it is easy to obtain information about her. She was an interesting person who overcame adversity to achieve success in mathematics. In addition the mathematical problems that she worked on are relatively easy to understand (but you will have to work hard to understand the details of her work).

Here are a few references to get you started:

Davis, Martin and Hersh, Reuben, "Hilbert's 10th problem," Scientific American, 229 (November 1971), 84-91.
Feferman, Solomon, "Julia Bowman Robinson, December 8, 1919--July 30, 1985," Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences 1994, 63: 453-478 [General remark: The quality of the biographies in this journal is very high; you might want to look at the journal and pick out a mathematician to write about]. This was reprinted in The Collected Works of Julia Robinson, published by the AMS.
Reid, Constance, Julia, A Life in Mathematics, a book published by the MAA. A review has been written by Fernando Q. Gouvêa of Colby College in Maine and editor of MAA OnLine
Devlin, Keith, "Hilbert's tenth problem," pp. 128-147 in Devlin's Mathematics: The New Golden Age, London: Penguin Books, 1988. This book is a superb exposition of a number of topics in advanced mathematics.
Reid, Constance, "The autobiography of Julia Robinson," The College Mathematics Journal, 17 (1986), 2-21. Reprinted in More Mathematical People (1990) edited by Donald Albers, Jerry Alexanderson, and Constance Reid.
Reid, Constance, and Robinson, Raphael M., "Julia Bowman Robinson (1919-1985)," pp. 182-189 in Women of Mathematics. A Biobibliographic Sourcebook (Greenwood Press, 1987), edited by Louise S. Grinstein and Paul J. Campbell. This book is one of the best sources of information about women mathematicians.
Reid, Constance, "Being Julia Robinson's Sister," Notices of the American Mathematical Society, 43 (1996), 1486-1492.

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If you have comments, send email to V. Frederick Rickey at fred-rickey@usma.edu .
Posted 3 December 1996. Revised 24 March 1997 and 4 January 2003.