David Peter Robbins (12 August 1942 in

Brooklyn Brooklyn () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York. Kings County is the most populous county in the State of New York, and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, be ...

– 4 September 2003 in

Princeton Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ni ...

) was an American

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change. History On ...

. He is most famous for introducing alternating sign matrices.. He is also known for his work on generalizations of

Heron's formula In geometry, Heron's formula (or Hero's formula) gives the area of a triangle in terms of the three side lengths , , . If s = \tfrac12(a + b + c) is the semiperimeter of the triangle, the area is, :A = \sqrt. It is named after first-century ...

on the area of polygons, due to which

Robbins pentagon In geometry, a Robbins pentagon is a cyclic pentagon whose side lengths and area are all rational numbers. History Robbins pentagons were named by after David P. Robbins, who had previously given a formula for the area of a cyclic pentagon as a ...

s (

cyclic Cycle, cycles, or cyclic may refer to: Anthropology and social sciences * Cyclic history, a theory of history * Cyclical theory, a theory of American political history associated with Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. * Social cycle, various cycles in s ...

pentagons with integer side lengths and areas) were named after him. Robbins grew up in

Manhattan Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state ...

, where he attended the

Fieldston School Ethical Culture Fieldston School (ECFS), also referred to as Fieldston, is a private independent school in New York City. The school is a member of the Ivy Preparatory School League. The school serves approximately 1,700 students with 480 facult ...

. He studied at Harvard, where his undergraduate advisor was

Andrew Gleason Andrew Mattei Gleason (19212008) was an American mathematician who made fundamental contributions to widely varied areas of mathematics, including the solution of Hilbert's fifth problem, and was a leader in reform and innovation in teaching at ...

. He went to

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

to do his graduate work and, after a hiatus during which he taught at Fieldston, finished his

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...

in 1970. He then taught at MIT, Phillips Exeter Academy,

Hamilton College Hamilton College is a private liberal arts college in Clinton, Oneida County, New York. It was founded as Hamilton-Oneida Academy in 1793 and was chartered as Hamilton College in 1812 in honor of inaugural trustee Alexander Hamilton, following ...

and

Washington and Lee University , mottoeng = "Not Unmindful of the Future" , established = , type = Private liberal arts university , academic_affiliations = , endowment = $2.092 billion (2021) , president = William C. Dudley , provost = Lena Hill , city = Lexington ...

. In 1980 he moved to

Princeton, New Jersey Princeton is a municipality with a borough form of government in Mercer County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey. It was established on January 1, 2013, through the consolidation of the Borough of Princeton and Princeton Township, both of whi ...

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 ''Advances in Applied Mathematics'' is a peer-reviewed mathematics journal publishing research on applied mathematics. Its founding editor was Gian-Carlo Rota (Massachusetts Institute of Technology); from 1980 to 1999, Joseph P. S. Kung (Universi ...

''. 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 first winner of the prize, in 2008, was

Neil Sloane __NOTOC__ Neil James Alexander Sloane (born October 10, 1939) is a British-American mathematician. His major contributions are in the fields of combinatorics, error-correcting codes, and sphere packing. Sloane is best known for being the creator a ...

for the

On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (OEIS) is an online database of integer sequences. It was created and maintained by Neil Sloane while researching at AT&T Labs. He transferred the intellectual property and hosting of the OEIS to t ...

. The

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...

has another prize, the David P. Robbins Prize (AMS) with the same name the first winners of which were Samuel P. Ferguson and

Thomas C. Hales Thomas Callister Hales (born June 4, 1958) is an American mathematician working in the areas of representation theory, discrete geometry, and formal verification. In representation theory he is known for his work on the Langlands program and the p ...

for their work on the

Kepler conjecture The Kepler conjecture, named after the 17th-century mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler, is a mathematical theorem about sphere packing in three-dimensional Euclidean space. It states that no arrangement of equally sized spheres filling s ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Robbins, David P. 1942 births 2003 deaths Deaths from pancreatic cancer 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians Combinatorialists Harvard University alumni Phillips Exeter Academy faculty Deaths from cancer in New Jersey

See also

References