AMS Presidents: A Timeline

47. Julia Bowman Robinson (1919-1985)

President 1983-1984

Robinson was the first woman to serve as president of the American Mathematical Society, and was also the first woman mathematician to be elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, in 1975. She spent many years trying to solve David Hilbert's famous 10th problem (to find an effective method for determining if a given Diophantine equation is solvable in integers) and her work contributed greatly to its ultimate solution. Robinson was on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley. Her many honors included membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a MacArthur Foundation Prize Fellowship.

• History of the Second Fifty Years: American Mathematical Society, 1939-1988 , by Everett Pitcher (AMS, 1988), which includes AMS Presidents from 1939-1988 (and reports on all aspects of the Society during the period).
• The MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
• Mathematics Genealogy Project
• "Being Julia Robinson's Sister," by Constance Reid, Notices of the AMS, December 1996, p.1486.
• A Century of Mathematics in America, Part III, Edited by Peter Duren with the assistance of Richard A. Askey, Harold M. Edwards and Uta C. Merzbach (American Mathematical Society, 1989), "Julia Bowman Robinson (1919-1985) [Reprint]," by Constance Reid with Raphael M. Robinson, p.405.
• "Julia Bowman Robinson," by Julie Bricker, Biographies of Women Mathematicians, Agnes Scott College.