Gian-Carlo Rota

Gian-Carlo Rota, born in Vigevano, Italy, in 1932 and died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1999, was an Italian-American mathematician and philosopher. He studied at Princeton and took his doctorate at Yale in 1956 under Jacob T. Schwartz, and he spent most of his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was the only person ever appointed Professor of Applied Mathematics and Philosophy. He began as a functional analyst and became a leading combinatorialist; his ten papers on the Foundations of Combinatorics in the 1960s helped make the field respectable, and he worked on incidence algebras, umbral calculus, Sheffer sequences and probability theory. His philosophical writing concerned the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. He founded the journal Advances in Mathematics in 1961, belonged to the National Academy of Sciences and served as vice president of the American Mathematical Society from 1995 to 1997.