Julia: A Life in Mathematics (Spectrum)

In high school Julia Bowman stood alone as the only girl - and the best student - in the junior and senior math classes. She had only one close friend and no boyfriends. Although she was to learn that there are such people as mathematicians, her ambition was merely to get a job teaching mathematics in high school. At great sacrifice her widowed stepmother sent her to the University of California at Berkeley. But at Berkeley, in a society of mathematicians, she discovered herself. There was also a prince at Berkeley, a brilliant young assistant professor named Raphael Robinson. Theirs was to be a marriage that would endure until her death in 1985. Julia is the story of Julia Bowman Robinson, the gifted and highly original mathematician who during her lifetime was recognized in ways that no other woman mathematician had ever been recognized. This unusual book brings together in one volume the prizewinning Autobiography of Julia Robinson by her sister, the popular mathematical biographer Constance Reid, and three very personal articles about her work by outstanding mathematical colleagues.

According to Martin Gardner, "No one today has written about mathematics with more grace, knowledge, skill, and clarity than Constance Reid"

After such books as "From Zero to Infinity" and "A Long Way from Euclid," she turned to biography with a life of the great mathematician, David Hilbert. As a biographer she has always chosen to write about mathematicians whose contributions to mathematics have gone beyond their mathematical research, and she followed "Hilbert" with lives of Richard Courant, Jerzy Neyman, and Eric Temple Bell. In collaboration with D. J. Albers, and G. L. Alexanderson, she also edited "More Mathematical People" and an illustrated history of the International Mathematical Congresses.

The Mathematical Association of America has awarded Mrs.Reid its Plya Prize for her article about her sister,"The Autobiography of Julia Robinson," and its Beckenbach Prize for her most recent book, "The Search for E. T. Bell." For the latter she also received the 1993 Honorable Mention in Mathematics of the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers.