ROBINSON

GERMANY (see also List of Individuals)

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6.10.1918 Waldenburg/PL - 11.4.1974 New Haven CT/USA

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Abraham Robinson was born in today's Poland where his father passed away before his birth. Once the Nazis had taken over power in Germany in 1933, the Robinsons moved to Palestine. Abraham studied mathematics at Hebrew University from 1936 and moved in 1940 to Sorbonne University in Paris where he had won a scholarship. After the German invasion to France he flew to England, and served in the Royal Air Force Establishment in Farnborough as a scientific officer. Robinson was offered in 1946 the position of senior mathematics lecturer at the newly founded Aeronautics College in Cranfield. He was considered an authority in supersonic aerodynamics and wing theory and thus invited to serve as a member of the Fluid Motion Committee of the Aeronautical Council of Great Britain. Robinson submitted a PhD thesis to the University of London in 1949 on metamathematics, a pioneering work in model theory. He was offered in 1951 a position of associate professor in applied mathematics at the University of Toronto, Canada. In 1957, Robinson was appointed professor of mathematics at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He moved from 1962 to 1967 to the University of California in Los Angeles UCLA as a professor of mathematics and philosophy and then made his last academic move to Yale University. In late 1973 he was diagnosed as suffering from a cancer of the pancreas and passed away shortly later.

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Robinson has significantly contributed to algebra, to model theory, to nonstandard analysis, to arithmetics, to computer sciences and to aerodynamics. In the latter field he made essential contributions to the understanding of the delta wing during his stay at Farnborough. Once in Canada he published papers on wave propagation and structural analysis and he presented his book on the Wing theory.

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_{Dauben, J.W. (1981). Robinson, Abraham. Dictionary of scientific biography 18: 748-752, F.L. Holmes, ed. Scribner's Sons: New York.}

_{Keisler, H.J. (1979). Selected papers of Abraham Robinson. Yale University Press: New Haven. MacIntyre, A.J. (1978). Abraham Robinson 1918-1974. Bulletin American Mathematical Society 83(4): 646-666. P}

_{Robinson, A., Laurmann, J.A. (1956). Wing theory. University Press: Cambridge.}

_{Robinson, A. (1979). Selected papers of Abraham Robinson 3: Aeronautics. Yale University Press: New Haven. http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/ http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/∼history/Mathematics/Robinson.html P}