Julia Robinson

“In Julia Robinson we find a mathematician who was a heroine in her own time and a role model for all time. It is a story of childhood, illness, love, marriage, disappointment, obsession, and triumph.”

“Notices: Can you tell me your memories of Julia Robinson, what she was like as a person?Davis: Very nice, very straightforward. Broad in her interests, mathematical and otherwise. And great power—there is no question in my mind that she was a much more powerful mathematician than I. We worked together on a problem on which we didn’t get anywhere. We were trying to prove the unsolvability of the decision problem for word equations. It turned out that we wouldn’t have been able to do that because the problem is solvable. Makanin solved it positively.”

“We say a mathematical theory is decidable if there is an effective method of determining the validity of each statement of the theory. If there is no such method, the theory is undecidable. It is clear that if there is a mechanical way of transforming each statement of an undecidable theory into an equivalent statement of another theory, the second theory is also undecidable. This principle, together with the fact that the arithmetic of natural numbers is undecidable, enables us to solve the decision problem for fields of finite degree over the rationals.”

“In this paper, we shall show the validity of an iterative procedure suggested by George W. Brown ... This method corresponds to each player choosing in turn the best pure strategy against the accumulated mixed strategy of his opponent up to then.”