15 Facts About Julia Robinson

1.

Julia Robinson's father owned a machine equipment company while her mother was a school teacher before marriage.

2.

Julia Robinson's mother died when Robinson was 2 years old and her father remarried.

3.

Julia Robinson graduated high school with a Bausch-Lomb award for being overall outstanding in science.

4.

In 1936, Julia Robinson entered San Diego State University at the age of 16.

5.

Julia Robinson took five mathematics courses in her first year at Berkeley, one being a number theory course taught by Raphael M Robinson.

6.

Julia Robinson received her BA degree in 1940, and later married Raphael in 1941.

7.

Julia Robinson received her PhD degree in 1948 under Alfred Tarski with a dissertation on "Definability and Decision Problems in Arithmetic".

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8.

Julia Robinson's dissertation showed that the theory of the rational numbers was an undecidable problem, by demonstrating that elementary number theory could be defined in terms of the rationals.

9.

Julia Robinson began exploring methods for this problem in 1948 while at the RAND Corporation.

10.

Julia Robinson's work regarding Diophantine representation for exponentiation and her method of using Pell's equation led to the JR hypothesis in 1950.

11.

Robinson was not allowed to teach in the Mathematics Department at Berkeley after marrying Raphael M Robinson in 1941, as there was a rule which prevented family members from working together in the same department.

12.

Julia Robinson was chosen as the first female president of the American Mathematical Society but was unable to complete her term as she was suffering from leukemia.

13.

In 1982, Julia Robinson gave the Noether Lecture of the Association for Women in Mathematics; her lecture was called Functional Equations in Arithmetic.

14.

Julia Robinson was Alan Cranston's campaign manager in Contra Costa County when he ran for his first political office, state controller.

15.

In 1984, Julia Robinson was diagnosed with leukemia, and she died in Oakland, California, on July 30,1985.