Julia Robinson

Julia Robinson was an American mathematician who lived from 1919 to 1985 and is best known for her work in computability theory and on decision problems. Her research on Hilbert's tenth problem, which asks for a general method to decide whether a Diophantine equation has integer solutions, produced the hypothesis that carries her initials, and that hypothesis proved central to the negative solution of the problem by Yuri Matiyasevich in 1970, a result now called the MRDP theorem. She took her doctorate in 1948 under Alfred Tarski with a thesis on definability and decision problems in arithmetic and spent her career at the University of California, Berkeley. She was the first female mathematician elected to the National Academy of Sciences and was chosen as the first female president of the American Mathematical Society, although illness kept her from completing the term.