Yurii Rogozhin’s Contributions to the Field of Small Universal Turing Machines

In the field of small universal Turing machines, Yurii Rogozhin holds a special prize: he was first to close off an infinite number of open questions by drawing a closed curve that separates the infinite set of Turing machines that are universal from a finite set of small machines for which we don’t yet know. Rogozhin did this by finding the smallest known universal Turing machines at the time, both in terms of number of states and number of symbols. This brief note summarises this and a few of Yurii’s other contributions to the field, including his work with Manfred Kudlek on small circular Post machines.