Enders Anthony Robinson
Dr. Enders Anthony Robinson received his S.B. in mathematics and statistics
in 1950 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1952, he
received an S.M. in economics from M.I.T. where he did his thesis work
under Professor Paul Samuelson and Professor Robert Solow, both later
winners of the Nobel Prize. From 1952 to 1954, Dr. Robinson was
director of the M.I.T. Geophysical Analysis Group and he developed the
first digital signal filtering methods to process seismic records used
in oil exploration. The available computer, the M.I.T. Whirlwind
digital computer, was not powerful enough to make this research work
commercially feasible at the time. Professor Norbert Wiener of M.I.T.
took an active interest in this work which represented the first
successful application of his recently developed theory of prediction
and filtering of time series. In 1954, Dr. Robinson received his Ph.D.
in geophysics from M.I.T. He then worked in the oil industry both as
a geophysicist and as an economist. In 1958, Dr. Robinson joined the
mathematics faculty at the University of Wisconsin at Madison where he
became acting director of the Computer Science Department. In 1960, the
University of Wisconsin granted a fellowship to Dr. Robinson to work in
Uppsala, Sweden under Professor Herman Wold and Professor Harald Cramer,
earlier developers of time series analysis. Dr. Robinson stayed in Sweden
from 1960 to 1964 as Deputy Professor of Statistics at Uppsala University.
With the advent of transistorized computers in the 1960s, digital methods
became economically feasible for use in oil exploration. In 1965, six
geophysicists and Dr. Robinson formed Digicon Inc. which was one of the
first companies to process seismic records by computers. From 1970 to
1983, Dr. Robinson divided his time between the oil exploration industry
and universities. He was a member of the Boston Statistical Consulting
Cooperative, a group set up by professors at M.I.T. and Harvard. In
1981-82, he was a visiting professor of geophysics and theoretical
mechanics at Cornell University and in 1983 he became the McMan
Professor of Geophysics at the University of Tulsa. He spent 1990-1992
at the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard.
In 1969, Dr. Robinson received the Medal Award of the Society
of Exploration Geophysicists in recognition of outstanding contributions
to the digital processing of seismic data and the Conrad Schlumberger
Award of the European Association of Exploration Geophysicists for a
rationalization and formalization of the geophysicist's approach to
data enhancement. In 1983, he was made an honorary member of the
Society of Exploration Geophysicists, and in 1984 he received the
Donald G. Fink Prize Award of the IEEE. In 1988, he was elected a
member of the National Academy of Engineering for pioneering contributions
to digital seismic processing.
Dr. Robinson is the author of books on probability and statistics,
time series analysis, and geophysics. His recent book is Einstein's
Relativity in Metaphor and Mathematics.
