Herbert Ellis Robbins (1922 - 2001) was a mathematician and statistician who 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 in print. He was a professor at (in chronological order) the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (where he was one of the original members of the first statistics department in the USA, founded in 1946), Columbia University, and Rutgers University.

In 1955, Robbins introduced empirical Bayes methods at the Third Berkeley Symposium on Probability and Mathematical Statistics.