47. Julia Bowman Robinson
President 1983–1984
Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley, 1948
Robinson was the first woman to serve as president of the American Mathematical Society, and was also the first woman mathematician to be elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, in 1975. She spent many years trying to solve David Hilbert's famous 10th problem (to find an effective method for determining if a given Diophantine equation is solvable in integers) and her work contributed greatly to its ultimate solution. Robinson was on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley. Her many honors included membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a MacArthur Foundation Prize Fellowship.
Additional information
MR Author Profile- History of the Second Fifty Years: American Mathematical Society, 1939-1988, by Everett Pitcher (AMS, 1988), which includes AMS Presidents from 1939-1988 (and reports on all aspects of the Society during the period).
- The MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
- Mathematics Genealogy Project
- "Being Julia Robinson's Sister," by Constance Reid, Notices of the AMS, December 1996, p.1486.
- "Julia Robinson and Hilbert's Tenth Problem (Zala Films, Produced and Directed by George Csicsery), Reviewed by Carol Wood, Notices of the AMS, May 2008, p. 573.
- A Century of Mathematics in America, Part III, Edited by Peter Duren with the assistance of Richard A. Askey, Harold M. Edwards and Uta C. Merzbach (American Mathematical Society, 1989), chapter "Julia Bowman Robinson (1919-1985)," by Constance Reid with Raphael M. Robinson, page 405
- "Julia Bowman Robinson," by Julie Bricker, Biographies of Women Mathematicians, Agnes Scott College.
- Who's That Mathematician? Images from the Paul R. Halmos Photograph Collection
- More Images from the Paul R. Halmos Photograph Collection, Who's That Mathematician ?
- "The Autobiography of Julia Robinson," by Constance Reid (an excerpt from More Mathematical People, edited by Donald J. Albers, Gerald L. Alexanderson, and Constance Reid)