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Gilbert de Beauregard Robinson

Canadian mathematician (1906-1992)

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJun 4, 2026
Entity authorityQ3105893 ↗
Source-derived summary

Gilbert de Beauregard Robinson, MBE (3 June 1906 – 8 April 1992) was a Canadian mathematician most famous for his work on combinatorics and representation theory of the symmetric groups, including the Robinson-Schensted algorithm.

Biography

Gilbert Robinson was born in Toronto in 1906. He then attended St. Andrew's College and graduated from the University of Toronto in 1927. He received his Ph.D. at Cambridge where his advisor was group theorist Alfred Young. He then joined the Mathematics Department in Toronto where he served until his retirement in 1971, except for a period of wartime service in Ottawa.

Robinson specialized in the study of the symmetric groups on which he became a recognized authority. In 1938 he formulated, in a paper studying the Littlewood–Richardson rule, a correspondence that would later become known as the Robinson-Schensted correspondence. He wrote some forty papers on the topic of symmetric groups. He also published The Foundations of Geometry (1940) and The Representations of the Symmetric Groups (1961) as well as Vector Geometry (1962).

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Gilbert de Beauregard Robinson” as canadian mathematician (1906-1992). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewA productive starting point for separating a subject’s documented career from later reputation and commemoration. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1906, 1992, 1927, 1971—that can be checked directly. The authority record carries competing date values—1906-06-03, 1906—which should remain separate until their references and qualifiers are resolved. The account is most persuasive where Gilbert, Beauregard and Robinson can be independently traced.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as canadian mathematician (1906-1992). Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

Evidence profile

Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3105893. VIAF identifies the subject as 103652140. The Library of Congress control number is n82111899. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1906, 1992, 1927 and 1971.

Critical limits

Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

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Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Gilbert de Beauregard Robinson” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.