How Julia Robinson helped define the limits of mathematical knowledge
Every December 8 for years, Julia Robinson blew out the candles on her birthday cake and made the same wish: that someday she would know the answer to Hilbert’s 10th problem. Though she worked on the problem, she did not care about crossing the finish line herself. “I felt that I couldn’t bear to die without knowing the answer,” she told her sister. In early 1970, just a couple of months after her 50th birthday, Robinson’s wish came true. Soviet mathematician Yuri Matiyasevich announced that he had solved the problem, one of 23 challenges posed in 1900 by the influential German mathematician David Hilbert. Matiyasevich was 22 years old, born around the time Robinson had started thinking about the 10th problem. Though the two had not yet met, she wrote to Matiyasevich shortly after learning of his solution, “I am especially pleased to think that when I first made the conjecture you were a baby and I just had...