Hartley Rogers, Jr.

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.

Early life and education 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,

Career 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.

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

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

Selected works

Hartley Rogers Jr., The Theory of Recursive Functions and Effective Computability, MIT Press, (paperback), (textbook)