Herbert Robbins

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Herbert Ellis Robbins
Herbert Robbins visiting Purdue in 1966
Born	(1915-01-12)January 12, 1915 New Castle, Pennsylvania, US
Died	February 12, 2001(2001-02-12) (aged 86) Princeton, New Jersey, US
Alma mater	Harvard University
Scientific career
Institutions	University of North Carolina Columbia University Rutgers University
Thesis	On the Classification of the Maps of a 2-Complex into a Space (1938)
Doctoral advisor	Hassler Whitney
Doctoral students	Raghu Raj Bahadur Cyrus Derman David Siegmund Herbert Wilf Gopinath Kallianpur

Herbert Ellis Robbins (January 12, 1915 – February 12, 2001) was an American mathematician and statistician. He did research in topology, measure theory, statistics, and a variety of other fields.

He was the co-author, with Richard Courant, of What is Mathematics?, a popularization that is still (as of 2012^[update]) in print. The Robbins lemma, used in empirical Bayes methods, is named after him. Robbins algebras are named after him because of a conjecture (since proved) that he posed concerning Boolean algebras. The Robbins theorem, in graph theory, is also named after him, as is the Whitney–Robbins synthesis, a tool he introduced to prove this theorem. The well-known unsolved problem of minimizing in sequential selection the expected rank of the selected item under full information, sometimes referred to as the fourth secretary problem, also bears his name: Robbins' problem (of optimal stopping).