11 Facts About Gian-Carlo Rota

Gian-Carlo Rota was an Italian-American mathematician and philosopher.

Gian-Carlo Rota spent most of his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked in combinatorics, functional analysis, probability theory, and phenomenology.

Gian-Carlo Rota then pursued graduate studies at Yale University, where he received a Ph.

Much of Gian-Carlo Rota's 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.

Gian-Carlo Rota was a consultant for the Rand Corporation and for the Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Gian-Carlo Rota taught a difficult but very popular course in probability.

Gian-Carlo Rota taught Applications of Calculus, differential equations, and Combinatorial Theory.

Gian-Carlo Rota began his career as a functional analyst, but switched to become a distinguished combinatorialist.

Gian-Carlo Rota 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.

Gian-Carlo Rota worked on the theory of incidence algebras 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.

Gian-Carlo Rota died of atherosclerotic cardiac disease on April 18,1999, apparently in his sleep at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.