Robinson, Julia Bowman

American Logician and Number Theorist 1919–1985

Julia Bowman Robinson, the second daughter of Helen Hall and Ralph Bowers Bowman, was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on December 8, 1919. When Robinson was 9 years old, she contracted scarlet fever and a year later developed rheumatic fever. Julia's father hired a private teacher to work with her three mornings a week and, in one year, she had completed the state-required materials for the fifth through eighth grades. It was during this time that she first became fascinated with mathematics.

Early Mathematics Honors

By the time Robinson entered her junior year of high school, she was the only girl taking mathematics courses and advanced science courses such as physics. In 1936, when she graduated* from high school, she was awarded honors in mathematics and science, including the Bausch-Lomb medal for all-around excellence in science.

*When Julia Robinson graduated from high school, her parents gave her a slide rule that she treasured and named "Slippy."

At the age of 16, Robinson enrolled at San Diego State College, now known as San Diego State University, where her older sister, Constance Bowman, attended classes. Julia majored in mathematics with the intention of earning teaching credentials.

Prior to her senior year, Julia transferred to the University of California at Berkeley to study to become a mathematician. It was there that she met Raphael M. Robinson, an assistant professor of mathematics at Berkeley. After receiving a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) in 1940, she immediately began graduate studies and earned a graduate teaching fellowship in the mathematics department.

In 1941, during her second year of graduate school at Berkeley, Julia married Robinson. Because of a university rule forbidding spouses to teach concurrently in the same department, Julia gave up her teaching fellowship and attempted to start a family.

But Robinson later discovered the risk of bearing a child was too dangerous for her health due to the rheumatic fever she suffered as a child. In 1946, at the encouragement of her husband, Robinson turned her attention back to mathematics and in 1947 began to work at Berkeley toward a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) under the advisement of Alfred Tarski, a Polish mathematician.

Work on the Tenth Problem

In 1948 Robinson received her Ph.D. and began work on trying to solve the tenth on a list of twenty-three major problems posed by David Hilbert, a prominent mathematician at the beginning of the century. The Tenth Problem was:

Given a Diophantine equation , with only integer solutions, with any number of unknown quantities and with rational integral numerical coefficients (and whole-number exponents) devise a process according to which it can be determined by a finite number of operations whether the equation is solvable in rational integers. For example, x ² + y ² − 2 = 0 has four Diophantine solutions—(1, 1), (−1, 1), (−1,−1), (1,−1)—but x ² + y ² − 3 = 0 has no solutions.

Striving to solve this problem occupied the largest portion of Robinson's professional career. The solution, which would be her major contribution to mathematics, was not completed until 1970. Many honors were bestowed upon Robinson as a result of her foundation for the solution to the Tenth Problem. In 1975 she became the first woman mathematician to be elected to the National Academy of Science. She later became the first woman officer of the American Mathematical Society (1978) and the first woman to serve as its president (1982). In 1983 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, consisting of $60,000 a year for 5 years, in recognition of her contributions to mathematics.

In August 1984, Robinson was diagnosed with leukemia, and she died on July 30, 1985, at the age of 65.

Gay A. Ragan

Bibliography

Grinstein, Louise S., and Paul J. Campbell. Women in Mathematics. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, Inc., 1987.

Henderson, Henry. "Julia Bowman Robinson." In Modern Mathematicians. New York: Facts on File, Inc., 1996.

National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. Celebrating Women in Mathematics and Science. Reston, VA: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 1996.

Internet Resources

"Julia Bowman Robinson." <http://www.agensscott.edu/lriddle/women/robinson.htm>.

"Julia Bowman Robinson." <http://www-grouups,dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Robinson_Julia.html>.

"Julia Robinson, Functional Equations in Arithmetic." <http://www.awm.math.org/noetherbrochure/Robinson82.html>.

Reid, Constance. Being Julia Robinson's Sister. Notices of the American Mathematical Society, December 1996, p. 1486–1492. <http://www.ams.org/notices/>.