Hartley Rogers, Jr.

Who is Hartley Rogers, Jr.?

Hartley Rogers, Jr. is a mathematician who has worked in recursion theory, and who is currently a professor in the Mathematics Department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Rogers equivalence theorem is named after him.

Born in 1926 in Buffalo, New York, he studied under Alonzo Church at Princeton, and received his Ph.D. there in 1952. He has served on the MIT faculty since 1956.

There he has been involved in many scholarly extracurricular activities, including running SPUR for MIT undergraduates, overseeing the mathematics section of RSI for advanced high school students, and coaching the MIT Putnam exam team for nearly two decades starting in 1990, including the years 2003 and 2004 when MIT won for the first time since 1979. He also runs a seminar called 18.S34: Mathematical Problem Solving for MIT freshmen.

Rogers is known within the MIT undergraduate community also for having developed a multivariable calculus course with the explicit goal of providing a firm mathematical foundation for the study of physics.