Hartley Rogers

Hartley Rogers Junior (born July 6, 1926 in Buffalo , New York , † July 17, 2015 in Waltham , Massachusetts ) was an American mathematician who studied mathematical logic (theory of computability , recursion theory , complexity theory ), mathematics education and probability theory concerned.

Rogers graduated from Yale University with a bachelor's degree in English literature in 1946 (after which he spent a year in Cambridge) and a master's degree in physics in 1950, and received his master's degree in mathematics from Princeton University in 1951 , where he was in 1952 at Alonzo Church ( Some Results on Definability and Decidability in Elementary Theories , Parts 1–5). As a post-doctoral student, he was a Benjamin Pierce instructor at Harvard University from 1952 to 1955 . In 1955 he was first visiting professor, from 1956 assistant professor and from 1964 professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . From 1971 to 1973 he headed the faculty and from 1974 to 1980 he was Associate Provost. In 2009 he retired.

He made significant contributions to recursion theory and wrote a textbook about it. A variant of the recursion sentence comes from him .

At MIT, he was also known for his contributions to math education. From 1962 to 1964 he was a member of the committee (Committee on Curriculum Content Planning) that significantly changed the undergraduate education; in 1996 he initiated the program for undergraduates (SPUR), in which a graduate student as a mentor and an undergraduate for 6 weeks in the summer intensively work on a research problem (for which a prize named after Rogers has been awarded since 2001), and coached the MIT team for the Putnam competition. From 1993 to 2006 he headed the mathematics section of the Research Summer Institute program for advanced high school students at MIT. He taught a seminar in mathematical problem solving for freshmen and developed a course in multi-variable analysis, particularly aimed at physics students.

In 1968 he received an honorary MA in Cambridge, where he was a visiting scholar in 1967/68 (Clare Hall). From 1964 to 1967 he was vice president of the Association for Symbolic Logic . From 1960 to 1961 he was a Guggenheim Fellow. From 1969 to 1986 he was editor of the Annals of Mathematical Logic. In 1965 he won the Lester Randolph Ford Award for his essay Information Theory . From 1974 to 1981 he was the managing editor of MIT Press.

John Stillwell is one of his PhD students .

He married Adrianne Ellefson in 1953 and has three children. Rogers was a passionate rower.

Fonts

• The Theory of Recursive Functions and Effective Computability, McGraw Hill 1967, MIT Press 1987
• Recursive functions over well ordered partial orderings, Proc. Amer. Math. Soc., Vol. 10, 1959, pp. 847-853
• with Donald L. Kreider: Constructive versions of ordinal number classes, Trans. Amer. Math. Soc., Vol. 100, 1961, pp. 325-369
• On universal functions, Proc. Amer. Math. Soc., Vol. 16, 1965, pp. 39-44
• Computing degrees of unsolvability, Mathematische Annalen, Volume 138, 1959, pp. 125-140, digitized
• Interview in Joel Segel (Ed.), Recountings, Conversations with MIT mathematicians, AK Peters 2009

Web links

• Hartley Rogers, Jr., professor emeritus of mathematics, dies at 89 (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Hartley Rogers in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)
2. ^ Mathematics Magazine, Volume 37, 1964, pp. 63-78, online