Background
Robbins grew up in Manhattan, where he attended the Fieldston School.
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David Robbins
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He studied at Harvard, where his undergraduate advisor was Andrew Gleason.
Career
He is most famous for introducing alternating sign matrices. He is also known for his work on generalizations of Heron"s formula on the area of polygons, due to which Robbins pentagons (cyclic pentagons with integer side lengths and areas) were named after him. He went to Massachusetts Institute of Technology to do his graduate work and, after a hiatus during which he taught at Fieldston, finished his Doctor of Philosophy in 1970.
He then taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Phillips Exeter Academy, Hamilton College and Washington and Lee University.
In 1980 he moved to Princeton, New Jersey and worked at the Institute for Defense Analyses Center for Communications Research there until his death from pancreatic cancer. A symposium was held in Robbins" honor in June 2003, the papers from which were published as a special issue of the journal Advances in Applied Mathematics.
The Mathematical Association of America established a prize named in his honor in 2005, given every three years to one or more researchers in algebra, combinatorics, or discrete mathematics. The American Mathematical Society has another prize, the David P. Robbins Prize (American Mathematical Society) with the same name the first winners of which were Samuel P. Ferguson and Thomas C. Hales for their work on the Kepler conjecture.
Achievements
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Born
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Died
September 4, 2003 (aged 61) -
Nationality
United States