Gian-Carlo Rota

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

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 Stanisław 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.

Rota founded the Advances in Mathematics journal in 1961.

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.

Rota attended the Colegio Americano de Quito in Ecuador, and graduated with an A.B. in mathematics from Princeton University in 1953 after completing a senior thesis, titled "On the solubility of linear equations in topological vector spaces", under the supervision of William Feller. He then pursued graduate studies at Yale University, where he received a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1956 after completing a doctoral dissertation, titled "Extension Theory Of Ordinary Linear Differential Operators", under the supervision of Jacob T. Schwartz.

Gian-Carlo Rota (April 27, 1932 – April 18, 1999) was an Italian-American mathematician and philosopher. He spent most of his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked in combinatorics, functional analysis, probability theory, and phenomenology.