Rota was born in Vigevano, Italy. His father, Giovanni, an architect and prominent antifascist, was the brother of the mathematician Rosetta, who was the wife of the writer Ennio Flaiano.[1][2] Gian-Carlo's family left Italy when he was 13 years old, initially going to Switzerland.
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.
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 barstopocket knives to students who asked questions in class or did well on tests.[6][7]
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.[5] 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.[8] 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 sequencesofbinomial type, and worked on fundamental problems in probability theory. His philosophical work was largely in the phenomenologyofEdmund Husserl.[9]
^Rota, Gian-Carlo (2000). "Ten Remarks on Husserl and Phenomenology". Phenomenology on Kant, German Idealism, Hermeneutics and Logic. Vol. 39. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands. pp. 89–97. doi:10.1007/978-94-015-9446-2_7. ISBN978-90-481-5448-7.
The Forbidden City of Gian-Carlo Rota (a memorial site) at the Wayback Machine (archived June 30, 2007) 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.
