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America > United States

Socio-cultural movements

Groups by dedication

Scientists > Mathematicians

Educators > Teachers / Lecturers / Professors

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Character
foto

Julia Hall Bowman Robinson

Saint Louis, Missouri (USA) 08-12-1919 ‖ Oakland, California (USA) 30-07-1985

Period of activity: From 1948 until 1980

Geographical classification: America > United States

Socio-cultural movements

Groups by dedication

Scientists > Mathematicians

Educators > Teachers / Lecturers / Professors

Writers

Context of feminine creation

Julia Bowman and her older sister Constance remained close, and both contributed to the history of mathematics. Constance, who was a journalist, was a well-known science biographer—particularly of her sister [Julia: A Life in Mathematics, Mathematical Association of America, 1996]– and popularizer of mathematics.

She said of herself: “What I really am is a mathematician. Rather than be remembered as the first woman at this or that, I would rather be remembered as a mathematician, simply for the theorems I have proven and the problems I have solved."

Her husband, Raphael Mitchel Robinson, established the Julia Bowman Robinson Scholarship Fund for graduate students in mathematics in Berkeley in 1986.

Predecessors: Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia (1646-1684), mathematician and philosopher; Émilie du Châtelet (1706-1749), mathematician, physicist and philosopher; Laura María 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, among others.

Her contemporaries were the mathematicians Katherine Johnson (1918-2020), Jacqueline Ferrand (1918-2014), Paulette Libermann (1919-2007), Vera Nikolaevna Kublanovskaya (1920-2012), and Kateryna Yushchenko (1919-2001), a 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 servicewoman, among others.

Review

Julia Bowman Robinson was an American mathematician. She had a difficult childhood: at the age of 2 her mother died and at the age of 10 a serious illness left her isolated for a whole year and caused her to miss two years of schooling. At the age of 18, she lost her father, who committed suicide due to the Great Depression. She was an enthusiastic student of mathematics. Her most important works deal with Diophantine equations and the decidability theory: she contributed greatly to the proof of Matiyasevich's theorem on the insolvability of Hilbert's tenth problem.

She made an important contribution to the game theory, showing that the dynamics of a fictitious player converge towards a Nash equilibrium in a mixed strategy in the framework of a zero-sum game with two players.

Activities

English

  • The eight queens
    • Spain > Mathematics > 3rd ESO > Algebraic sense
    • Spain > Mathematics > 3rd ESO > Socio-affective sense
    • Spain > Mathematics > 4th(A) ESO > Algebraic sense
    • Spain > Mathematics > 4th(A) ESO > Socio-affective sense
  • The OSO game
    • Spain > Mathematics > 1st ESO > Algebraic sense
    • Spain > Mathematics > 1st ESO > Socio-affective sense
  • The prisoner's dilemma
    • Spain > Mathematics > 3rd ESO > Algebraic sense
    • Spain > Mathematics > 3rd ESO > Socio-affective sense
    • Spain > Mathematics > 4th(A) ESO > Algebraic sense
    • Spain > Mathematics > 4th(A) ESO > Socio-affective sense
    • Spain > Mathematics > 4th(B) ESO > Algebraic sense
    • Spain > Mathematics > 4th(B) ESO > Socio-affective sense
  • The squares
    • Spain > Mathematics > 2nd ESO > Algebraic sense
    • Spain > Mathematics > 2nd ESO > Socio-affective sense

Spanish

  • El dilema del prisionero
    • Spain > Mathematics > 3rd ESO > Algebraic sense
    • Spain > Mathematics > 3rd ESO > Socio-affective sense
    • Spain > Mathematics > 4th(A) ESO > Algebraic sense
    • Spain > Mathematics > 4th(A) ESO > Socio-affective sense
    • Spain > Mathematics > 4th(B) ESO > Algebraic sense
    • Spain > Mathematics > 4th(B) ESO > Socio-affective sense
  • El juego de los cuadraditos
    • Spain > Mathematics > 2nd ESO > Algebraic sense
    • Spain > Mathematics > 2nd ESO > Socio-affective sense
  • El juego del OSO
    • Spain > Mathematics > 1st ESO > Algebraic sense
    • Spain > Mathematics > 1st ESO > Socio-affective sense
  • Las ocho reinas
    • Spain > Mathematics > 3rd ESO > Algebraic sense
    • Spain > Mathematics > 3rd ESO > Socio-affective sense
    • Spain > Mathematics > 4th(A) ESO > Algebraic sense
    • Spain > Mathematics > 4th(A) ESO > Socio-affective sense

Catalan

  • El dilema del presoner
    • Spain > Mathematics > 3rd ESO > Algebraic sense
    • Spain > Mathematics > 3rd ESO > Socio-affective sense
    • Spain > Mathematics > 4th(A) ESO > Algebraic sense
    • Spain > Mathematics > 4th(A) ESO > Socio-affective sense
    • Spain > Mathematics > 4th(B) ESO > Algebraic sense
    • Spain > Mathematics > 4th(B) ESO > Socio-affective sense
  • El joc de l'OS
    • Spain > Mathematics > 1st ESO > Algebraic sense
    • Spain > Mathematics > 1st ESO > Socio-affective sense
  • Els quadrets
    • Spain > Mathematics > 2nd ESO > Algebraic sense
    • Spain > Mathematics > 2nd ESO > Socio-affective sense
  • Les huit reines
    • Spain > Mathematics > 3rd ESO > Algebraic sense
    • Spain > Mathematics > 3rd ESO > Socio-affective sense
    • Spain > Mathematics > 4th(A) ESO > Algebraic sense
    • Spain > Mathematics > 4th(A) ESO > Socio-affective sense

Justifications

  • She managed to demonstrate a convergence theorem that is considered the most important in Elementary Game Theory.
  • She worked in the theory of numbers with outstanding studies in the theory of computation, the theory of computational complexity, specifically in decision problems.
  • She worked on Diophantine equations.
  • Her conjecture, Robinson's hypothesis, was basic to the resolution of Hilbert's tenth problem.
  • She was the first woman to be elected to the mathematics division of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1976.
  • In 1983 she was awarded a McArthur Award, a scholarship to support the work of scientists of the highest level, endowed with half a million dollars.
  • First woman president of the American Mathematical Society between 1982 and 1984.

Biography

Julia Bowman was born on 8 December 1919 in St. Louis (Missouri, USA). In 1921 her mother died. Her father married soon after and the family –the couple, her older sister Constance and Julia– moved to San Diego (California, USA). At the age of 9, she fell ill with scarlet fever and shortly after recovering, she contracted rheumatic fever. These health problems kept her isolated for a long time, prevented her from sharing time with her sisters, and caused heart problems that would affect her entire life. Due to her illness, Julia missed two years of school, so her parents gave her a tutor at home for a year, who taught her subjects from fifth to eighth grade. Julia returned to school in ninth grade, attending Theodore Roosevelt Junior High School. She graduated in 1936 with honours in science and was awarded the Bausch-Lomb Honorary Medal for excellent results in mathematics and science. That same year she entered San Diego State University as the only woman who followed some subjects such as mathematics or physics.

In 1937, her father committed suicide after losing all his savings as a result of the Great Depression that devastated the United States in the 1930s. She and her sister were able to continue their studies thanks to the financial help of an aunt of hers. Shortly after, her sister, Constance, was hired as a teacher at San Diego High School and helped Julia continue her studies.

In 1939, encouraged by some of her professors, she transferred to the University of California at Berkeley, where she began to truly enjoy mathematics.

In 1941, she married Raphael Robinson (1911-1995), with whom she learned number theory during her first year of college. At that time, Julia was an assistant professor at that university and had to leave her position when the institution forbade both members of a married couple to work in the same department. So she was forced to stay at home, although she got sporadic contracts in some other department and other institutions. When she became pregnant, her heart problems worsened, she lost the child she was expecting and she was diagnosed with a short time to live. Discouragement led her to take refuge in mathematics.

In 1942, Julia attended a seminar given by Alfred Tarski in which the mathematician posed a problem that Julia brought to him solved two days later. Tarski proposed her to carry out her doctoral thesis under her supervision and, in 1948, Julia presented the memory entitled Definability and Decision Problems in Arithmetic, in which she demonstrated that integers could be defined arithmetically in terms of rational numbers and by means of certain types of operations.

After finishing her thesis, mathematics became interested in Hilbert's tenth problem: Is there a method that allows one to determine, in a finite number of steps, whether a Diophantine equation is solvable in integers? Recall that a Diophantine equation is an algebraic equation with integer coefficients and for which integer solutions are sought.

In 1961, Julia Robinson published the article The decision problem for exponential diophantine equations in which the so-called Robinson hypothesis was introduced, which consisted of finding a certain type of diophantine relation that necessarily implied the non-existence of the method alluded to by Hilbert. Julia continued to search for a solution to the problem posed by David Hilbert until, in 1970, the young Russian mathematician Yuri Matiyasevich found a relationship of the type indicated in the Robinson hypothesis: he did so using the terms of the Fibonacci sequence. Matiyasevich's theorem confirmed the insolvability of Hilbert's tenth problem. With the same scientific interests, Julia and Yuri worked together publishing several articles in collaboration.

Julia Robinson also made an important contribution to game theory, showing that the dynamics of a fictitious player converge towards a Nash equilibrium in a mixed strategy in the framework of a zero-sum game with two players.

Julia's older sister, Constance Reid, was a well-known science biographer—particularly of her sister [Julia: A Life in Mathematics, Mathematical Association of America, 1996]—and popularizer of mathematics.

In 1976 Julia was elected to the Mathematics Division of the National Academy of Science, making her the first female mathematician to hold this position. In 1982, the Association for Women in Mathematics dedicated its Noether Lecture to her, an annual event that honours women who have made fundamental contributions to mathematics. In addition, Julia was president of the American Mathematical Society (1982-1984): she was the first woman with that responsibility. In 1983 she was awarded a McArthur Award, a scholarship to support the work of scientists of the highest level, endowed with half a million dollars. In 1985, she was a member of the “American Academy of Arts and Sciences”. 

Julia Robinson died of leukaemia at age 65, on 30 July 1985. Her fragile health did not prevent her from moving forward.

 

Extracted from:

Mujeres con ciencia (06/02/2022)

Wikipedia (06/02/2022)

Sociedad Canaria Isaac Newton de Profesores de Matemáticas Vol. 70, April, 2009. Retrieved from: https://mdc.ulpgc.es/utils/getfile/collection/numeros/id/700/filename/705.pdf (06/02/2022) 

Works

- A note on exact sequential analysis. Univ. California Publ. Math. (N.S.) 1, pp. 241-246. 1948

- Definability and decision problems in arithmetic. Journal of Symbolic Logic 14, pp. 98-114. 1949

- General recursive functions. Proceedings of American Mathematical Society 1, pp. 703-718. 1950

- An iterative method of solving a game. Annals of Mathematics (2) 54, pp. 296-301. 1951

- Existential definability in arithmetic. Transactions of American Mathematical Society 72, pp. 437-449. 1952

- A note on primitive recursive functions. Proc. American Mathematical Society 6, pp. 667-670. 1955

- The undecidability of algebraic rings and fields. Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 10, pp. 950-957. 1959

- Problems of number theory arising in metamathematics. Reports of the Institute in the Theory of Numbers (Boulder), pp.303-306. 1959

- The undecidability of exponential diophantine equations. Notices of Amer. Math. Soc. 7:1, p. 75. 1960

- The decision problem for exponential diophantine equations. Ann. of Math. (2) 74, pp. 425-436. 1961

- The undecidability of exponential Diophantine equations. E. Nagel et al., editors. Stanford Univ. Press, Stanford, Calif., pp.12-13. 1962

- On the decision problem for algebraic rings. E. Nagel et al., editors. Stanford Univ. Press, Stanford, Calif., pp. 297-304. 1962

- The decision problem for fields. J. W. Addison et all., editors. North-Holland, Amsterdam, pp. 299-311. 1965

- An introduction to hyperarithmetical functions. Journal of Symbolic Logic 32, pp. 325-342. 1967

- Recursive functions of one variable. Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 19, pp. 815-820. 1968

- Finite generation of recursively enumerable sets. Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 19, pp. 1480-1486. 1968

- Unsolvable diophantine problems. Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 22, pp. 534-538. 1969

- Finitely generated classes of sets of natural numbers. Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 21, pp. 608-614. 1969

- Diophantine decision problems. W.J. LeVeque, editor. Math. Assoc. Amer. Studies in Mathematics 6, pp. 76-116. 1969

- Hilbert's tenth problem. D.J.Lewis, editor. Proc. Sympos. Pure Math. 20, pp. 191-194. 1971

- Solving diophantine equations. P.C.Suppes et al, editors. Studies in Logic and Foundations of Math. 74, pp. 63-67. 1973

- Axioms for number theoretic functions. A.I.Shirshov et al, editors. "Nauka", Sibirsk. Otdel., Novosibirsk, pp. 253-263. 1973

- Two universal three-quantifier representations of enumerable sets. B.A.Kushner et al. editors 
Vycisl. Centr Akad. Nauk SSSR, Moscow pp. 112-123, 216. 1974.

- Reduction of an arbitrary Diophantine equation to one in 13 unknowns. Acta Arithmetica 
27, pp.521-553. 1975

- Hilbert's tenth problem. Diophantine equations: positive aspects of a negative solution. F.E.Browder, editor. Proc. Sympos. Pure Math. 28, pp. 323-378. 1976

- Between logic and arithmetic. University of Michigan Ann Arbor, August 19-22, pp. 1-11. 1980

- The collected works of Julia Robinson. Collected Works 6, xliv+338 pp. 1996     

 

Sources: https://logic.pdmi.ras.ru/~yumat/JRobinson/Jpublications.html#CollectedWorks (06/02/2022)

 

Bibliography

  • Feferman, Solomon (1994). “Julia Bowman Robinson 1919–1985”, Memoria bibliográfica, de la National Academy of Sciences, 06/02/2022 <http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/robinson-julia.pdf>
  • Reid, Constance (1997). Julia: A Life in Mathematics. Editorial Mathematical Association of America.
  • Hersh, Reuben y John-Steiner, Vera (1997). Matemáticas, una historia de amor y de odio. Editorial Paidós. 
  • Alonso, Ángel (1999). Julia Robinson: gran matemática, gran desconocida. Números, Revista de didáctica de las matemáticas. Volume 40, pp. 29-36. 06/02/2022. <https://mdc.ulpgc.es/utils/getfile/collection/numeros/id/342/filename/349.pdf>
  • Wikipedia contributors, (2022): “Julia Robinson"-Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 06/02/2022, <https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Robinson>
  • Macho Stadler, Marta (2018). “Julia Bowman Robinson y el décimo problema de Hilbert”, Mujeres con ciencia, Universidad del País Vasco, 06/02/2022, <https://mujeresconciencia.com/2018/08/16/julia-bowman-robinson-y-el-decimo-problema-de-hilbert/>
  • Macho Stadler, Marta (2014). “Julia Bowman Robinson, matemática”, Mujeres con ciencia, Universidad del País Vasco, 06/02/2022, <https://mujeresconciencia.com/2014/12/08/julia-bowman-robinson-matematica/>
  • O'Connor, J. J. and Robertson, E. F. (2002). “Julia Hall Bowman Robinson”, Mac Tutor, 29/03/2022, <https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Robinson_Julia/>

Didactic approach

· Mathematics.

She can also be studied on the following subjects:

· Technology, computer science, physics and chemistry: to propose different strategies to solve a given problem.

· Philosophy: in activities related to propositional logic.

Documents