Abraham Robinson

Abraham Robinson ( born October 6, 1918 in Waldenburg, Silesia. † April 11, 1974 in New Haven, Connecticut, real name Robin Abraham 's son ) was an American mathematician of German origin and founder of the non-standard analysis. He was also an expert in aerodynamics.

Life and work

Robinson's father died shortly before his birth. As Jews, with a long tradition Zionist family in 1933 emigrated from Germany to Palestine, where Robinson in 1935 began his studies in mathematics at Lewitzky and Abraham Fraenkel in Jerusalem. He was a brilliant student and won after graduating in 1939 a scholarship to continue studying at the Sorbonne in Paris. For the invasion of France in 1940 he managed to escape with one of the last boats to England, where he joined the Free French Air Force joined. As a mathematician, he was transferred to the research center of the Royal Aircraft at Farnborough, where he soon evolved into an expert on wing shapes ( delta wing for supersonic flows ). In addition to his research in aerodynamics, he was interested in further mathematical logic and studied for a master's degree at the University of Jerusalem in 1946 continued at the University of London until his promotion in Jerusalem in 1949. During this time and later in Toronto, he did pioneering work in the theory of models.

In 1951 he became Professor of Applied Mathematics in Toronto, 1957 successor of Fraenkel at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In 1962 he became professor of mathematics and philosophy at the University of California at Los Angeles, and from 1967 until his death professor at Yale. In 1973 he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died of it a few months after surgery.

Robinson is best known for his invention of the Non-Standard Analysis in 1961, in which he, presented the idea of infinitesimal elements, already Leibniz and other mathematicians of the 17th century used on a solid basis.

In 1973 he received the Brouwer Medal. In 1970 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Nice ( Forcing in model theory ) and in 1950 in Cambridge (Massachusetts ) (Applied symbolic logic).