Remembering Mathematician Julia Bowman Robinson Julia Bowman Robinson, the first woman mathematician

Remembering Mathematician Julia Bowman Robinson

Julia Bowman Robinson, the first woman mathematician to be elected to the National Academy of Sciences, died on this day in 1985.

Robinson, who was born in 1919, is most famous for helping to answer a single math problem – Hilbert’s “Tenth Problem,” one of a series of mathematics problems posed at the Second International Congress of Mathematicians in 1900. The problem sought an effective way to determine whether an integer problem is soluble. Robinson and several other mathematicians, working separately and together, demonstrated such an algorithm cannot exist.

Robinson also spent a year working at the RAND Corporation, where, in 1951, she developed a fundamental theorem of elementary game theory.

Despite spending nearly her whole career at Berkeley, it was not until the publicity surrounding her election to the National Academy of Sciences in 1976, that her alma mater opted to offer her a tenured professorship.

Robinson was the first woman officer of the National Academy of Sciences, the first woman mathematician to receive a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (the so-called “Genius Grant”), and the first woman president of the American Mathematical Society.

Learn more.