Hartley Rogers Jr.

Hartley Rogers Jr. (1926 to 2015) was an American mathematician who worked in computability theory and was a professor in the Mathematics Department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Born in Buffalo, New York, he studied English at Yale, took a master's degree in physics, and then studied mathematics under Alonzo Church at Princeton, where he received his doctorate in 1952. He was a Benjamin Peirce Lecturer at Harvard from 1952 to 1955 and joined the MIT faculty in 1956, later chairing the MIT faculty senate and serving as associate provost. His doctoral students included Patrick Fischer, Louis Hodes, Carl Jockusch, Andrew Kahr, David Luckham, Rohit Parikh, David Park and John Stillwell. He 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, and he won the Lester R. Ford Award in 1965 for his expository article Information Theory.