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.
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.http://www.rota.org/hotair/rotasharp.html 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
Cambridge, Massachusetts. A reading room (2-285) in the
Department of Mathematics at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology is dedicated in his name.
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