Hartley Rogers Jr. (July 6, 1926 – July 17, 2015) was an American mathematician who worked in computability theory, and was a professor in the Mathematics Department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Biography

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Born in 1926 in Buffalo, New York, Rogers studied English as an undergraduate at Yale University, graduating in 1946. After visiting the University of Cambridge under a Henry Fellowship, he returned to Yale for a master's degree in physics, which he completed in 1950. He studied mathematics under Alonzo Church at Princeton, earned a second master's degree in 1951,[1] and received his Ph.D. there in 1952.[2]

He was a Benjamin Peirce Lecturer at Harvard University from 1952 to 1955. After holding a visiting position at MIT, he became a professor in the MIT Mathematics Department in 1956.[1] His doctoral students included Patrick Fischer, Louis Hodes, Carl Jockusch, Andrew Kahr, David Luckham, Rohit Parikh, David Park, and John Stillwell.[2] He chaired the MIT faculty senate from 1971 to 1973 and served as associate provost of the university from 1974 to 1980.[1]

Beyond teaching and research, Rogers was an avid rower and rowing competitor.[1]

He retired as a professor emeritus in 2009, and died on July 17, 2015.[1]

Mathematical work

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Rogers worked in mathematical logic, particularly recursion theory, and wrote the classic text Theory of Recursive Functions and Effective Computability.[3] The Rogers equivalence theorem is named after him.

Rogers won the Lester R. Ford Award in 1965 for his expository article Information Theory.[4]

Selected works

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  • Rogers, Hartley (1959). "Recursive functions over well ordered partial orderings". Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 10 (6): 847–853. doi:10.1090/s0002-9939-1959-0111685-8. MR 0111685.
  • Kreider, Donald L.; Rogers, Hartley (1961). "Constructive versions of ordinal number classes". Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 100 (2): 325–369. doi:10.1090/s0002-9947-1961-0151396-x. MR 0151396.
  • Rogers, Hartley (1965). "On universal functions". Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 16: 39–44. doi:10.1090/s0002-9939-1965-0171705-4. MR 0171705.
  • Hartley Rogers Jr., The Theory of Recursive Functions and Effective Computability, MIT Press, ISBN 0-262-68052-1 (paperback), ISBN 0-07-053522-1 (textbook)[5]

References

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  1. ^ a b c d e "Hartley Rogers, Jr., Professor Emeritus of Mathematics". MIT Mathematics Department. July 22, 2015. Retrieved 2024-06-28.
  2. ^ a b Hartley Rogers Jr. at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  3. ^ Hartley Rogers, Jr. (1967). Theory of Recursive Functions and Effective Computability. McGraw Hill.
  4. ^ Rogers Jr., Hartley (1964). "Information Theory". Mathematics Magazine. 37 (2): 63–78. doi:10.1080/0025570X.1964.11975485.
  5. ^ Yates, C. E. M. (March 1971). "Review: Theory of recursive functions and effective computability, by Hartley Rogers Jr". J. Symb. Log. 36 (1): 141–146. doi:10.2307/2271523. JSTOR 2271523. S2CID 222039152.