Herbert Ellis Robbins (January 12, 1915 – February 12, 2001) was one of the most prominent American mathematicians and statisticians of the 20th century. He did research in topology, measure theory, statistics, and a variety of other fields. He was the co-author, with Richard Courant, of What is Mathematics?, a popularization that is still (as of 2012) in print. The Robbins lemma, used in empirical Bayes methods, is named after him.