Observacions i context
- She had a difficult childhood. Her mother died when she was 2 years old. At the age of 10 she contracted rheumatic fever, that forced her to spend a year isolated from others, missing two years of schooling; and her father committed suicide for losing all their savings as a result of the Great Depression, when she was 18 years old.
- Despite missing two years of schooling, when she returned to school, she studied mathematics and physics, being the only woman to attend these classes. She graduated in 1936 with honours in science and was awarded the Bausch-Lomb Honorary Medal for excellent results in mathematics and science.
- She had great family support, in particular from her sister Constance and her adoptive mother, Edenia, who always encouraged her to continue her studies.
- Julia Bowman and her older sister Constance remained close, and both contributed to the history of mathematics. Constance was a journalist and she was a well-known science biographer—particularly of her sister [Julia: A Life in Mathematics, Mathematical Association of America, 1996]– and mathematics communicator.
- She died in 1985 as a result of leukaemia. Her husband, Raphael Mitchel Robinson, established the Julia Bowman Robinson Scholarship Fund for graduate students in mathematics in Berkeley in 1986.
- Julia Bowman's predecessors are Theano of Crotone (6th century BC) mathematician and philosopher; Hypatia of Alexandria (360-415), mathematician and philosopher; Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia (1646-1684), mathematician and philosopher; Émilie du Châtelet (1706-1749), mathematician, physicist and philosopher; Laura Maria Catharina Bassi (1711-1778), scientist, poetess and philosopher; Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718-1799), mathematician, linguist and philosopher; Sophie Germain (1776-1831), mathematician; and Maria Skłodowska-Curie (1867-1934), physicist, mathematician and chemist.
- Her contemporaries were the mathematicians Jacqueline Ferrand (1918-2014), Katherine Johnson (1918-2020), Paulette Libermann (1919-2007), Vera Nikolaevna Kublanovskaya (1920-2012) and Kateryna Yushchenko (1919-2001), mathematician and computer scientist.
- Other important female scientists of the early 20th century are Barbara McClintock (1902-1992), biologist; Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958), chemist; Inge Lehmann (1888-1993) geologist and seismologist; Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (1910-1994), chemist; Mary Leakey (1913-1996), anthropologist; Marie Tharp (1920-2006), geologist and cartographer; Hedy Lamarr (1914-2000), inventor; and Grace Murray Hopper (1906-1992), computer scientist and admiral, among others.