Rósa Péter

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Born: 1905 in Hungary
Died: 1977 in Hungary

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Rósa Péter studied at Loránd Eötvös University in Budapest where her interest in mathematics was brought about by Fejér's lectures. Another to have an important influence on Rósa Péter was László Kalmár who was a fellow student at Loránd Eötvös University.

After graduating in 1927 Rósa earned a living tutoring mathematics, unable to obtain a permanent job. Her first post, at the Budapest Teachers Training College, was obtained in 1945. When the College closed in 1955 she became a professor at Loránd Eötvös University and remained in this post until she retired in 1975.

Her first research topic was number theory but she became discouraged on finding that her results had already been proved by Dickson. For a while Rósa wrote poetry but arounf 1930 she was encouraged to return to mathematics by Kalmár. He suggested Rósa examine Gödel's work and in a series of papers she became a founder of recursive function theory.

Rósa wrote Recursive Functions in 1951 which was the first book on the topic and became a standard reference. In 1952 Kleene described Rósa Péter in a paper in Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. as

the leading contributor to the special theory of recursive functions.

From the mid 1950's she applied recursive function theory to computers. In 1976 her last book was on this topic Recursive Functions in Computer Theory.

References:

1. H Andréka, Rósa Péter, in Grinstein and Campbell, Women of Mathematics (1987).
2. L Kalmár, R Péter's Work in the Theory of Recursive Functions, in Les Fonctions Recursives et Leur Applications (1969).
3. E Morris and L Harkleroad, Rósa Péter : Recursive Function Theory's Founding Mother, Mathematical Intelligencer 12 (1990), 59-61.
4. L S Grinstein and P J Campbell (eds.), Women of Mathematics (Westport, Conn., 1987), 171-174.

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