Every December 8 for years, Julia Robinson blew out the candles on her birthday cakeand made the same wish: that somedayshe would know the answer to Hilbert's10th problem. Though she worked on the problem, she did not care about crossing the finish line herself. "I felt that I couldn't bear to die without knowing the answer," she told her sister.In early 1970, just a couple of months after her 50th birthday, Robinson's wish came true. Soviet mathematician Yuri Matiyasevich announced that he had solved the problem, one of 23 challenges posed in 1900 by the influential German mathematician David Hilbert.
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