Born in 1926 in Buffalo, New York, Rogers studied English as an undergraduate at Yale University, graduating in 1946.
After visiting the University of Cambridge under a Henry Fellowship, he returned to Yale for a master's degree in physics, which he completed in 1950.
He studied mathematics under Alonzo Church at Princeton, earned a second master's degree in 1951,[1] and received his Ph.D. there in 1952.
[2] He chaired the MIT faculty senate from 1971 to 1973 and served as associate provost of the university from 1974 to 1980.
Rogers won the Lester R. Ford Award in 1965 for his expository article Information Theory.