Gian-Carlo Rota

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Gian-Carlo Rota
Rota in 1970.
Born	April 27, 1932(1932-04-27) Vigevano, Italy
Died	April 18, 1999 (aged 66) Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
Residence	Italy, Ecuador, USA
Fields	Mathematician
Institutions	Massachusetts Institute of Technology Los Alamos National Laboratory
Alma mater	Princeton University Yale University
Doctoral advisor	Jacob T. Schwartz

Gian-Carlo Rota (April 27, 1932 – April 18, 1999, known as Juan Carlos Rota to Spanish-speakers) was an Italian-born American mathematician and philosopher.

He was born in Vigevano, Italy, where he lived until he was 13 years old. At that time his family fled Italy because his father, Giovanni Rota, was likely to be an object of fascist persecution.

He attended the Colegio Americano de Quito in Ecuador, and earned degrees at Princeton University and Yale University. For most of his career he was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was the only person ever to be appointed Professor of Applied Mathematics and Philosophy. He was also the Norbert Wiener Professor of Applied Mathematics.

Rota was one of the most respected and popular teachers at MIT. He taught a difficult but very popular course in probability, 18.313, which MIT has not offered again. He also taught 18.03 Differential Equations. His philosophy course in Phenomenology was offered on Friday nights to keep the enrollment manageable. Among his many eccentricities, he would not teach without a can of Coca-Cola, and handed out prizes ranging from Hershey bars to pocket knives to students who asked questions in class or did well on tests.^[1]^[2]

From 1966 until his death he was a consultant at Los Alamos National Laboratory, frequently visiting to lecture, discuss, and collaborate, notably with his friend Stan Ulam.

He began his career as a functional analyst, but changed directions and became a distinguished combinatorialist. His series of ten papers on "Foundations of Combinatorics" in the 1960s is credited with making it a respectable branch of modern mathematics. He said that the one combinatorial idea he would like to be remembered for is the correspondence between combinatorial problems and problems of the location of the zeroes of polynomials.[1] He worked on the theory of incidence algebras (which generalize the 19th-century theory of Möbius inversion) and popularized their study among combinatorialists, set the umbral calculus on a rigorous foundation, unified the theory of Sheffer sequences and polynomial sequences of binomial type, and worked on fundamental problems in probability theory. His philosophical work was largely in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl.