Name Gian-Carlo Rota | Role Mathematician Fields Mathematics, Philosophy | |
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Institutions Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyLos Alamos National Laboratory Alma mater Princeton UniversityYale University Notable students William Y.C. ChenDaniel I. A. CohenMark HaimanPatrick O'NeilRichard P. StanleyWalter Whiteley Books On the Foundations of Combinatorial Theory: Combinatorial Geometries Residence Italy, Ecuador, United States of America Similar People Garrett Birkhoff, Jacob T Schwartz, Jack Howlett, Mark Kac, Stanislaw Ulam | ||
Gian carlo rota
Gian-Carlo Rota (April 27, 1932 – April 18, 1999) was an Italian-born American mathematician and philosopher.
Contents
- Gian carlo rota
- Gian Carlo Rota il matematico filosofo Pierre Cartier
- Early life and education
- Career
- Death
- References
Gian Carlo Rota: il matematico filosofo - Pierre Cartier
Early life and education
Rota was born in Vigevano, Italy. His father, Giovanni, a prominent antifascist, was the brother of the mathematician Rosetta, who was the wife of the writer Ennio Flaiano. 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.
Career
Much of Rota's career was spent as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 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.
In addition to his professorships at MIT, Rota held four honorary degrees, from the University of Strasbourg, France (1984); the University of L'Aquila, Italy (1990); the University of Bologna, Italy (1996); and Brooklyn Polytechnic University (1997). Beginning in 1966 he was a consultant at Los Alamos National Laboratory, frequently visiting to lecture, discuss, and collaborate, notably with his friend Stanislaw Ulam. He was also a consultant for the Rand Corporation (1966–71) and for the Brookhaven National Laboratory (1969–1973). Rota was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1982, was vice president of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) from 1995–97, and was a member of numerous other mathematical and philosophical organizations.
He taught a difficult but very popular course in probability. He also taught Applications of Calculus, differential equations, and 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 began his career as a functional analyst, but switched to become a distinguished combinatorialist. His series of ten papers on the "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.
Death
Rota died, apparently in his sleep of atherosclerotic cardiac disease, at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His death was discovered after he failed to arrive in Philadelphia for lectures he had planned to present beginning on Monday, April 19, 1999.
A reading room in MIT's Department of Mathematics is dedicated to Rota.