Rózsa Péter

Rózsa Péter, born Rózsa Politzer, (17 February 1905 – 16 February 1977) was a Hungarian mathematician and logician. She is best known as the "founding mother of recursion theory". Péter was born in Budapest, Hungary, as Rózsa Politzer (Hungarian: Politzer Rózsa). She attended Pázmány Péter University (now Eötvös Loránd University), originally studying chemistry but later switching to mathematics. She attended lectures by Lipót Fejér and József Kürschák. While at university, she met László Kalmár; they would collaborate in future years and Kalmár encouraged her to pursue her love of mathematics. After graduating in 1927, Péter could not find a permanent teaching position although she had passed her exams to qualify as a mathematics teacher. Due to the effects of the Great Depression, many university graduates could not find work and Péter began private tutoring. At this time, she also began her graduate studies. Initially, Péter began her graduate research on number theory. Upon discovering that her results had already been proven by the work of Robert Carmichael and L. E. Dickson, she abandoned mathematics to focus on poetry. However, she was convinced to return to mathematics by her friend László Kalmár, who suggested she research the work of Kurt Gödel on the theory of incompleteness. She prepared her own, different proofs to Gödel's work. Péter presented the results of her paper on recursive theory, "Rekursive Funktionen", to the International Congress of Mathematicians in Zurich, Switzerland in 1932. In the summer of 1933, she worked with Paul Bernays in Göttingen, Germany, for the long chapter on recursive functions in the book Grundlagen der Mathematik that appeared in 1934 under the names of David Hilbert and Bernays. Her main results are summarised in the book and also appeared in several articles in the leading journal of mathematics, the Mathematische Annalen, the first in 1934. Publication was under the name Politzer-Péter as she had changed her Jewish surname Politzer into Péter that same year.