Here is David's obituary from the Princeton Packet. He was a friend and colleague. I'll miss him. Victor OBITUARIES, Sept. 9, 2003 David Robbins Mathematician, school board member David Robbins of Princeton, a mathematician and cryptologist as well as a former member and president of the Princeton Regional Board of Education, died Thursday in Princeton after a battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 61. Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., Dr. Robbins earned his undergraduate degree from Harvard University and his doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He taught at the Fieldston School in New York City and at Phillips Exeter Academy, where he met his wife. He also taught at Hamilton College and Washington and Lee University. In 1966, Dr. Robbins received the National Security Agency's Exceptional Service Award, which is given only every few years for significant contributions to the security of the United States. In 1980, he moved with his wife to Princeton to work for the U.S. Defense Department mathematical research facility, the Institute for Defense Analyses, where he solved mostly classified mathematical and cryptological problems. Author or co-author of more than 100 papers on mathematics, his most widely known nonclassified works are his theorems and conjectures on alternating sign matrices. Dr. Robbins perceived a number of strikingly similar patterns while analyzing mathematical work by Charles Dodgson, also known as Lewis Carroll. These patterns also appeared in several other unrelated areas of mathematics and led Dr. Robbins to postulate a series of conjectures. In the last seven years, many of his conjectures have been proven to be correct and have furthered work in fields as diverse as quantum mechanics, computational algebra and abstract mathematical symmetry. Just before his death, he was struggling with a 2,000-year-old geometrical question: What is the formula for calculating the largest possible area of a polygon given only the lengths of its sides? In 100 B.C., Heron of Alexandria found such a formula for a triangle. The formula for the square was discovered by Brahmagupta, an Indian mathematician, in the seventh century A.D. And in 1994, Dr. Robbins discovered the formula for both the pentagon and the hexagon. He was not able to extrapolate his formulae to the heptagon or find a general solution for all polygons before his death. In 1992, Dr. Robbins was elected to the Princeton Regional Board of Education, where he served for six years, including one year as president. Son of the late Lester and Ethel Udell Robbins, he is survived by his wife, Deborah; son Matthew Eli; stepmother Sheila Robbins of New York; sisters Marjorie Robbins Friedlander of Pacific Palisades, Calif., and Ann Aknin of Dana Point, Calif.; half-brother Peter Robbins of New York; stepsisters Barbara Morgan of Sayreville and Meredith Hardy of Palm Desert, Calif.; and stepbrother Thomas Hardy of Worcester, Mass. The funeral was Sunday. -- Victor S. Miller | " ... Meanwhile, those of us who can compute can hardly victor@idaccr.org | be expected to keep writing papers saying 'I can do the CCR, Princeton, NJ | following useless calculation in 2 seconds', and indeed 08540 USA | what editor would publish them?" -- Oliver Atkin