This entry contributed by Margherita Barile

American mathematician Julia H. Bowman was born in Missouri, and spent her early childhood in Arizona, before settling down in San Diego, California. At the age of nine, she contracted a rheumatic fever that would have longstanding consequences on her health.

Her scientific education began in high school, where she was the only girl to take mathematics and physics classes. She excelled in both and received awards. She studied mathematics together with her sister Constance, who later became a journalist and biographer of mathematicians, at the San Diego State College. After graduating, Julia moved to Berkeley. There she met Raphael Robinson, her lecturer in number theory, and the two were married in late 1941. Being the wife of a professor would by no means facilitate her academic career. On the contrary, it kept her away from her favorite subject, mathematics, since an university rule prevented married couples from working in the same department. Hence Julia remained confined in the statistics lab through all the years of her teaching assistantship.

Her first published paper was General Recursive Functions (Princeton, 1947). In 1948, she received her Ph.D. under the supervision of A. Tarski with her thesis Definability and decision problems in arithmetic. Through her advisor, she became interested in Hilbert's tenth problem, on which she started working with M. Davis and H. Putman. The breakthrough came unexpectedly in 1970, when the young Russian Y. Matijasevich proved an elementary result on Fibonacci numbers that turned out to be the missing piece in the arguments that the three researchers had been developing for so many years. The problem was finally settled with a negative answer.

In 1976, Julia Robinson became the first woman mathematician to be elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Hilbert's Problems, Tarski