His unification algorithm eliminated one source of combinatorial explosion in resolution provers; it also prepared the ground for the logic programming paradigm, in particular for the Prolog language.

Robinson was born in Halifax, Yorkshire, England in 1930[2] and left for the United States in 1952 with a classics degree from Cambridge University.

He moved to Rice University in 1961, spending his summers as a visiting researcher at the Argonne National Laboratory's Applied Mathematics Division.

[10] He has received honorary Doctorates from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven 1988,[11] Uppsala University 1994,[12] and Universidad Politecnica de Madrid 2003.

[3] In 1994, he received the Humboldt Senior Scientist Award at the request of Wolfgang Bibel, which included a six-month stay at the Department of Computer Science of the Technische Universität Darmstadt.