Herbert Robbins
Herbert Ellis Robbins (January 12, 1915 – February 12, 2001) was one of the most prominent American mathematicians and statisticians of the 20th century. 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) 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).
Read more about Herbert Robbins: Biography, Selected Writings
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“The classicist, and the naturalist who has much in common with him, refuse to see in the highest works of art anything but the exercise of judgement, sensibility, and skill. The romanticist cannot be satisfied with such a normal standard; for him art is essentially irrational—an experience beyond normality, sometimes destructive of normality, and at the very least evocative of that state of wonder which is the state of mind induced by the immediately inexplicable.”
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