Gian-Carlo Rota

Gian-Carlo Rota
Rota in 1970.
Born	April 27, 1932(1932-04-27) Vigevano, Italy
Died	April 18, 1999(1999-04-18) (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.

Life

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.

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.

Rota could be temperamental 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. The Mathematics department assigned a junior faculty member to finish the course.

From 1966 until his untimely death in 1999, Rota was a consultant at Los Alamos National Laboratory, frequently visiting to lecture, discuss, and collaborate, notably with his friend Stan Ulam.

Rota began his career as a functional analyst, but switched to become 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. 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 planned to give on April 19, 1999.

A reading room (2-285) in MIT's Department of Mathematics is dedicated to Rota.

See also

• Rota–Baxter algebra
• List of American philosophers
• Joint spectral radius, introduced by Rota in the early 1960s

External links

• Gian-Carlo Rota at the Mathematics Genealogy Project.
• O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Gian-Carlo Rota", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews, http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Rota.html .
• Kung, Joseph; Rota, Gian-Carlo; Yan, Catherine (2009). Combinatorics: The Rota Way. Cambridge Mathematical Library. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 052173794X. http://www.math.tamu.edu/~cyan/book.html. 
• The Forbidden City of Gian-Carlo Rota (a memorial site) This page at www.rota.org was not originally intended to be a memorial web site, but was created by Rota himself with the assistance of his friend Bill Chen in January 1999 while Rota was visiting Los Alamos National Laboratory.
• Mathematics, Philosophy, and Artificial Intelligence: a dialogue with Gian-Carlo Rota and David Sharp
• "Fine Hall in its golden age: Remembrances of Princeton in the early fifties" by Gian-Carlo Rota.
• Tribute page by Prof. Catherine Yan (Texas A&M University), a former student of Rota
• Scanned copy of Gian-Carlo Rota's and Kenneth Baclawski's Introduction to Probability and Random Processes manuscript in its 1979 version.
• Gian-Carlo Rota (1996). Indiscrete Thoughts. Birkhäuser Boston. ISBN 0817638660 , ISBN 0-8176-3866-0; review at MAA.org
• The Digital Footprint of Gian-Carlo Rota: International Conference in memory of Gian-Carlo Rota, organized by the University of Milan (Italy)