Julia Robinson

Julia Hall Bowman Robinson
Julia Robinson in 1975
Born	December 8, 1919 St. Louis, Missouri, United States
Died	July 30, 1985 (aged 65) Oakland, California, United States
Citizenship	American
Nationality	United States
Fields	Mathematician
Institutions	University of California, Berkeley
Alma mater	University of California, Berkeley
Doctoral advisor	Alfred Tarski
Known for	Diophantine equations Decidability
Influenced	Yuri Matiyasevich
Notable awards	Noether Lecturer (1982) MacArthur Fellow
Spouse	Raphael M. Robinson

Julia Hall Bowman Robinson (December 8, 1919 – July 30, 1985) was an American mathematician best known for her work on decision problems and Hilbert's tenth problem.

Robinson was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the daughter of Ralph Bowers Bowman and Helen (Hall) Bowman. Her older sister was the mathematical popularizer and biographer Constance Reid. The family moved to Arizona and then to San Diego when the girls were a few years old. Julia attended San Diego High.

She entered San Diego State University in 1936 and transferred as a senior to University of California, Berkeley, in 1939. She received her BA degree in 1940 and continued in graduate studies. She received the Ph.D. degree in 1948 under Alfred Tarski with a dissertation on "Definability and Decision Problems in Arithmetic".

In 1975 she became a full professor at Berkeley, teaching quarter-time because she still did not feel strong enough for a full-time job.

Hilbert's tenth problem asks for an algorithm to determine whether a Diophantine equation has any solutions in integers. A series of results developed in the 1940s through 1970 by Robinson, Martin Davis, Hilary Putnam, and Yuri Matiyasevich resolved this problem in the negative; that is, they showed that no such algorithm can exist.

George Csicsery produced and directed a one-hour documentary about Robinson titled Julia Robinson and Hilbert's Tenth Problem, that premiered at the Joint Mathematics Meeting in San Diego on January 7, 2008. Notices of the American Mathematical Society printed a film review and an interview with the director.College Mathematics Journal also published a film review.