Norman Shapiro

Norman Zalmon Shapiro was an American mathematician and computer scientist, born in 1932, who co-authored the Rice-Shapiro theorem in computability theory. He took a bachelor degree at the University of Illinois in 1952 and a Ph.D. at Princeton in 1955 under Alonzo Church, and in that year coined the phrase strong reducibility for what is now called many-one reduction. In the summer of 1954 at Bell Laboratories he worked with Karel de Leeuw, Edward Moore and Claude Shannon on whether a random oracle lets a Turing machine compute noncomputable sequences. He was a leading mathematician and computer scientist at the RAND Corporation from 1959 to 1999, led early computer mapping work, and co-designed the MH message handling system.