Robinson

Abraham Robinson

Born: 6 Oct 1918 in Waldenburg, Germany (now Walbrzych, Poland)
Died: 11 April 1974 in New Haven, Connecticut, USA

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Robinson's family emigrated to Palestine in 1933, forced out of Germany since they were Jewish. There Robinson studied mathematics under Fraenkel and Levitzki. He went to the Sorbonne in 1939 but was forced to flee when the Germans invaded. After reaching England on one of the last small boats to evacuate refugees, he changed his name from Robinsohn and worked on aerodynamics during World War II.

After the War he attended London University and received a Ph.D. in 1949 for pioneering work in model theory, the metamathematics of algebraic systems. He went to Toronto in 1951 to take up a chair of applied mathematics but left for Jerusalem in 1957 to fill Fraenkel's chair.

During a year visiting Princeton he made the discovery for which he is best remembered, non-standard analysis. In 1967 he was appointed to Yale where he died of cancer at the age of 55.

References:

  1. Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  2. A J Macintyre, Abraham Robinson 1918-1974, Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 83 (1977), 646-666.
  3. A D Young, S Kochen, S Körner and P Roquette, Abraham Robinson, Bull. London Math. Soc. 8 (1976), 307-323.
  4. J W Dauben, Abraham Robinson : The Creation of Nonstandard Analysis, a Personal and Mathematical Odyssey (Princeton, 1995).
  5. G D Mostow, Abraham Robinson 1918-1974, Israel Journal of Mathematics 25 (1976), 4-14. 
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