Robert Lee Moore (November 14, 1882 – October 4, 1974) was an American mathematician who taught for many years at the University of Texas.

After the war, he ran a hardware store in Dallas, then little more than a railway stop, and raised six children, of whom Robert, named after the commander of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, was the fifth.

Moore entered the University of Texas at the unusually youthful age of 15, in 1898, already knowing calculus thanks to self-study.

Robert Lee Moore is known to have supervised 50 doctoral dissertations, almost all at Texas, including those of R. H. Bing, F. Burton Jones, John R. Kline, Edwin Evariste Moise, Mary Ellen Rudin, Gordon Whyburn, Richard Davis Anderson, and Raymond Louis Wilder.

He went out of his way to teach elementary and service courses every year, and actually forbade his pre-doctoral level students from consulting the mathematical literature.

African-American students were prohibited from even enrolling at the University of Texas until the late 1950s,[5] and Moore himself was strongly in favor of segregation.

[4] However, while Moore's racism is confirmed by several first-hand accounts of his refusal to teach African-American students, the often-repeated description of him as a misogynist and antisemite is based largely on his oral remarks.

Some of the sources reporting these remarks, such as Mary Ellen Rudin, also point out that in fact he encouraged females who showed mathematical talent and that he had Jewish students, such as Edwin E. Moise (who was asked about Moore's anti-Semitic reputation in an interview)[10] and Martin Ettlinger, and close colleagues, such as Hyman J. Ettlinger.