Nancy Blachman remembered a math contest. It had run at Saint Mary's College of California in the 1970s, popular with secondary schools across the Bay Area, and it had shaped the way she thought about numbers. By 2005, when she attended an education forum at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, the contest no longer existed. What happened next was not a resurrection of the old competition but something different entirely: a collaborative, non-competitive mathematics festival that would eventually reach tens of thousands of students around the world, all of it free, and all of it named for a woman who proved that some problems are worth a lifetime of work.
Julia Bowman Robinson was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1919 and entered San Diego State University at sixteen. Dissatisfied with the mathematics curriculum, she transferred to UC Berkeley for her senior year and received her BA in 1940. Robinson spent decades working on Hilbert's tenth problem, a challenge posed in 1900 that asked whether there exists a general algorithm for solving Diophantine equations. Her contributions, including what became known as the J.R. hypothesis, proved essential to the problem's eventual resolution in 1970. She became the first woman elected to the mathematics section of the National Academy of Sciences and the first woman to serve as president of the American Mathematical Society. Blachman chose Robinson's name deliberately: she wanted a role model who would show young girls that one need not be male to be a great mathematician.
When Blachman and MSRI development director Jim Sotiros reached out to the educational community about reviving the old Saint Mary's contest, high school math teacher Joshua Zucker responded. He remembered the contest too and had even saved a book of problems from it. But the group decided against a traditional competition. Instead they designed collaborative events where students could explore mathematics without rankings or scores, working together on problems rather than against each other. The response from local schools was so overwhelming that they needed a larger venue. Google, in nearby Mountain View, hosted the first festival in 2007. The following year, Pixar Animation Studios opened its Emeryville campus for the second event.
The festival grew quickly. After the initial Bay Area events, universities began hosting their own: Princeton, Stanford, UC Berkeley. By December 2019, the organization had held nearly 500 events in 25 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and 15 foreign countries. In 2020, they hosted over 120 festivals, an increase of more than 50 percent over 2018. The American Institute of Mathematics has served as a fiscal sponsor since 2013, and the organization has partnered with the National Museum of Mathematics, Gathering 4 Gardner, and the National Association of Math Circles. Friends of JRMF include Google's director of research Peter Norvig and former U.S. Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith. All events remain free of charge.
In December 2019, the festival celebrated what would have been Julia Robinson's 100th birthday with an event in her hometown. Robinson had died in 1985 at age sixty-five, a MacArthur Fellow who never saw the full flowering of the movement that bears her name. When COVID-19 shut down in-person gatherings in March 2020, the organization pivoted to a weekly webinar series offered in English, Spanish, and Hebrew, drawing participants from the United States, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East every Thursday. The pivot reflected the festival's core belief: that mathematical joy is not a scarce resource. It can be shared without being diminished, explored without being competed over, and offered to any student willing to sit with a problem long enough to find it beautiful.
Located at 37.38°N, 121.91°W in San Jose, California, near the headquarters of the organization. Norman Y. Mineta San Jose International Airport (KSJC) is approximately 3 miles north. Moffett Federal Airfield (KNUQ) is about 8 miles northwest. The festival's founding location at Google's Mountain View campus is visible to the northwest along the US-101 corridor. Stanford University and UC Berkeley, both early festival hosts, are visible along the San Francisco Bay shoreline.