h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: Julia Robinson - Mathematician - A87940849
Author: SashaQ - happysad - U9936370

Here is another little Entry in my series on Women Mathematicians.

Julia Robinson was not expected to live beyond the age of 40 due to the ill health she experienced as a child. However, modern medical treatment enabled her to defy that prediction.

Who or what is Rand, and why/when did Julia work for it/them? We know she has continued her studies but here's nothing in her employment history after how she 'obtained work as a laboratory assistant and teaching assistant in statistics at Berkeley' at some point before 1941 and in 1949 you say 'A prize of $200 had been offered by the Rand Corporation to anyone who could find a solution, but because Julia was working for Rand at the time, she was not eligible to receive the prize'.

Mind you, I learnt back in my days working in international banking how difficult it is getting money out of the Rand Common Monetary Area…

'During the McCarthy Era in the 1950s she spent time supporting political campaigns.' – Did she have any specific political belief, or did she just support any political campaign taking place nearby?
'In 1900, David Hilbert proposed a list of 23 problems that he thought would be important to mathematicians in the 20th Century' – Were they actually important to mathematicians in the 20th Century or does their importance stem from their being called important? (personally I would have thought important problems for mathematicians (depending on place/time of birth) during the 20th Century would be surviving the Great War, surviving the Russian Revolution, surviving the subsequent flu epidemic, feeding the family during the Great Depression, surviving the Second World War etc, but I suspect a different definition of 'problem') How many of the 23 problems were solved in the 20th Century?

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Thanks for reading <BB<

I took the footnote about Rand out - Julia had no employment history between being pregnant and finishing the PhD, and I don't know how she came to be working for the government's RAND Corporation, so it was a distraction.

I added a little more about the political campaigning as I found a couple of helpful h2g2 links

I also added a footnote about the 23 Problems and aimed to clarify the text - the Wars etc did indeed get in the way, but some work got done and there is still more to do - several of the Problems are areas to explore rather than problems to be solved.

Thanks – hope you don't mind my skewed view. I do have one more question, while I can see the logic in 'Republican' linking to 'how to tell if you are Republican or Democrat', I'm not sure I follow how 'Democratic Party' links to 'Mathematics'?

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Thanks for checking that - the dreaded clipboard problem on my computer strikes again... I corrected the link to point to the Entry on the Democratic Party

Good entry!

The only thing I can think to add to it is a footnote on the word Slippy to say that slide rules were often known as 'slipsticks' in America. You'd have to take the quotes off the word Slippy if you do that, as a footnote and a quote together would be confusing.

If names of films, albums and ships are in italics on h2g2, should names of slide rules be too?

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Thanks Gnomon I added the mention of slipstick to explain the name

I can imagine USS Slippy the Slipstick but I think inverted commas are what is required, like the names of songs

Using italics instead of inverted commas is valid for song names.

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