Herbert Robbins
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?''. 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).
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