Arthur Rubin

Arthur Rubin
Rubin at the Aquarium of the Pacific in August 2006
Born	1956 (age 60–61)
Residence	Southern California
Citizenship	United States
Nationality	American
Fields	Mathematician Aerospace engineering
Alma mater	Caltech
Doctoral advisor	Alexander S. Kechris
Other academic advisors	Gary Lorden

Arthur Leonard Rubin (born 1956) is an American mathematician and aerospace engineer, most notable for being named a Putnam Fellow on four consecutive occasions from 1970 to 1973.

Rubin's mother was Jean E. Rubin, a professor of mathematics at Purdue University and his father, Herman Rubin, a professor of statistics at the same university. He earned his Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology in 1978, under the direction of Alexander S. Kechris.

Rubin unsuccessfully stood as a Libertarian to represent the 55th district in the 1984 California State Assembly elections.

Rubin published his first paper in 1969 at the age of 13. As an undergraduate, Rubin was named a Putnam Fellow on four occasions, the first time in 1970, aged 14, making him the youngest Fellow to date. A Putnam fellowship is awarded to the five highest ranked scorers in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, an annual competition for undergraduate college students enrolled at institutions of higher learning in the United States and Canada. In 1972, he tied for third place in the first USA Mathematical Olympiad.

In 1974, Rubin was the subject of an article in the Madison Capital Times, in which his Caltech undergraduate advisor is quoted as saying that someone of Rubin's ability appeared in the United States "about once in every ten years".

Rubin's dissertation was entitled Free Algebras in Von Neumann–Bernays–Gödel Set Theory and Positive Elementary Inductions in Reasonable Structures. In 1979, Rubin co-authored a paper on list coloring of graphs with Paul Erdős, giving him an Erdős number of 1.