JULIA BOWMAN ROBINSON
" Julia is the first woman mathematician to be elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and, in 1983, she became the first woman president of the American Mathematical Society. Her other honors included election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a grant from the MacArthur Foundation, and an honorary degree from Smith College. "
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Julia never thought of herself as a brilliant person. In reflecting on her life, she focused instead on the patience that served her so well as a mathematician, which she attributed in part to a period of intense isolation as a child. At age 9, while living with her family in San Diego, she contracted scarlet fever, followed by rheumatic fever. Penicillin had just been discovered and was not yet available as a treatment. Instead, she lived at the home of a nurse for a year, missing two years of school. The 10th problem is a deep question about the limitations of our mathematical knowledge, though initially it looks like a more straightforward problem in number theory. It concerns expressions known as Diophantine equations. Named for Diophantus of Alexandria, a third century Hellenistic mathematician who studied equations of this form in his treatise Arithmetica. a Diophantine equation is a polynomial equation with any number of variables and with coefficients that are all integers. (An integer is a whole number, whether positive, negative or zero.)
Find a Julia Robinson Math Festival near you.. |
I of IV : julia robinson & hilbert's tenth problem
II of IV: Julia robinson math festival : Working together not against each other !
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