| Gian-Carlo Rota | |
|---|---|
Rota in 1970.
|
|
| Born | April 27, 1932 Vigevano, Italy |
| Died | April 18, 1999 (aged 66) Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA |
| Residence | Italy, Ecuador, USA |
| Fields | Mathematics, Philosophy |
| Institutions | Massachusetts Institute of Technology Los Alamos National Laboratory |
| Alma mater | Princeton University Yale University |
| Doctoral advisor | Jacob T. Schwartz |
| Notable students | Richard Ehrenborg, Mark Haiman, Patrick O'Neil, Richard P. Stanley, Ray Magliozzi, William Schmitt, Catherine Yan |
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.
Contents |
Rota was born in Vigevano, Italy. Gian-Carlo's family left Italy when he was 13 years old, initially going to Switzerland.
Rota attended the Colegio Americano de Quito in Ecuador, and earned degrees at Princeton University and Yale University. Much of his career was spent as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was and remains the only person ever to be appointed Professor of Applied Mathematics and Philosophy. Rota was also the Norbert Wiener Professor of Applied Mathematics.
Rota was one of the teachers at MIT. He taught a difficult but very popular course in probability, 18.313, which MIT has not offered again. He also taught 18.001 (Applications of Calculus), 18.03 (Differential Equations), and 18.315 (Combinatorial Theory). 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]
Rota could be tempermental at times: in 1976, he abruptly stopped teaching 18.313 in mid-semester. He felt that some students in the class were being disrespectful to him. He arrived one day to class, passed out a long examination, and said that due to the students' behavior, he would not be returning to the class this semester. A junior faculty member was assigned by the math department to finish out the class.
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.[3] 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.
He died in his sleep, after failing to arrive in Philadelphia for lectures he had planned to give on April 19, 1999.[4]
A reading room (2-285) in MIT's Department of Mathematics is dedicated to Rota.