“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.”