Herbert Robbins

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Herbert Ellis Robbins (born January 12, 1915 in New Castle (Pennsylvania) , † February 12, 2001 in Princeton ) was an American mathematician who dealt with topology, graph theory and statistics .

Life

Robbins studied at Harvard University with Marston Morse, among others, and received his doctorate there in 1938 with Hassler Whitney on a topological topic (On the Classification of the Maps of a 2-Complex into a Space). In 1938/39 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study (as well as 1952 to 1954). From 1939 to 1941 he was an instructor at New York University and after the Second World War, in which he served as an officer in the US Navy, he taught from 1946 to 1952 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in its newly established statistics faculty . From 1953 he was Higgins Professor of Mathematical Statistics at Columbia University , where he was retired in 1985. He was then until 1997 New Jersey Professor of Mathematical Statistics at Rutgers University .

As a statistician, he introduced empirical Bayesian methods at the Third Berkeley Symposium on Mathematical Statistics and Probability in 1955 . He and his student Sutton Monro co-invented the Robbins-Monro method in stochastic approximation (which is based on the classic Newton method ) and worked on optimal stop problems - a problem that is still unsolved today (2009) is named after him (Robbins problem, also called the fourth secretary problem). He is also known as the co-author of an introduction to mathematics with Richard Courant .

The Robbins problem within Boolean algebra , a long open main problem in the field of automated theorem proving, consists in showing that Robbins algebra is a Boolean algebra. It was solved in 1996 by William McCune (see there).

Robbins was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 1952/53 (at the Institute for Advanced Study) and 1975/76 (at Imperial College ) he was a Guggenheim Fellow. In 1974 he received an honorary doctorate from Purdue University . He was president of the Institute for Mathematical Statistics. In 1987 he received a scientific honor for his lifetime achievement in statistics from the New York City Mayor. In 1962 he gave a lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Stockholm ( A renewal theorem for non-identically distributed random variables , with YS Chow).

The Chapman-Robbins inequality and the Robbins-Monro process are named after him.

Fonts

  • with Richard Courant: Was ist Mathematik ?, Springer Verlag, 5th edition 2000, ISBN 354063777X (first What is mathematics?, Oxford University Press 1941)

literature

  • Donald J. Albers, GL Alexanderson Mathematical People - Profiles and Interviews , Birkhäuser 1985

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ An empirical Bayes approach to statistics , Proc. 3rd Berkeley Symposium, Vol. 1 Jerzy Neyman (Editor), University of California Press, 1956
  2. ↑ Robbins, Monro, A stochastic approximation method , Annals of Mathematical Statistics, Vol. 22, 1951, pp. 400-407, Project Euclid
personal data
SURNAME Robbins, Herbert
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Robbins, Herbert Ellis (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH January 12, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH New Castle, Pennsylvania
DATE OF DEATH February 12, 2001
Place of death Princeton