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 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).