The late Professor Emeritus Ivor Robinson was founding head of the Division of Mathematics and Mathematical Physics at The University of Texas at Dallas.
Dr. Robinson was among the first members recruited in 1963 to the Graduate Research Center of the Southwest (GRCSW), the private research organization that in 1969 became The University of Texas at Dallas.
Renowned experts in the fields of mathematics, relativity theory and cosmology were recruited by Dr. Robinson to be a part of this research institute. These faculty members later formed the core of the mathematical sciences and physics departments in the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics when UT Dallas was created.
In a 2012 interview, Dr. Robinson recalled that his faculty recruitment efforts were successful despite the then-remoteness of the North Texas region.
“I recruited relativity researchers of considerable promise by looking for them abroad,” he said. “In America, promising young physicists largely regarded American civilization as consisting of two coastal regions with a rather large desert area in between.”
Among those who joined Dr. Robinson as permanent faculty at the GRCSW were Dr. Istvan Ozsváth, a former professor of mathematics who died in 2013, and Dr. Wolfgang Rindler, professor emeritus of physics who died in February, 2019, at age 94. The three colleagues — and good friends — spent the remainder of their research and teaching careers at UT Dallas.
Dr. Robinson was an eminent mathematical physicist noted for his contributions to the development of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. He is known for his pioneering work on null electromagnetic fields, for his collaboration with Andrzej Trautman on models for spherical gravitational waves, and for the Bel–Robinson tensor. Sir Roger Penrose has credited him as an important influence in the development of twistor theory, through his construction of the so-called Robinson congruences.
Department of Mathematical Sciences organized and hosted The Mathematical Physics and General Relativity Symposium in honor of the scientific legacy of the late Professor Ivor Robinson. The list of plenary speakers included some of the major names of the contemporary science: Joshua Goldberg, Peter A. Hogan, Lane Hughston, Jim Isenberg, Bogdan Mielnik, Cecile Morette-Dewitt, Pawel Nurowski, Don N. Page, Peter Ozsvath, Eric Poisson, Robert Wald, Stanley Deser, and Malcolm A.H. MacCallum.
Stories for the newsletter, Math Matters, are produced by faculty and staff of the Department of Mathematical Sciences.
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