Math 170 Group 3 Project Part 2 Biography

Daniel Ayala Jacob Button Jacob Young

Gian-Carlo Rota
Gian-Carlo Rota was a famous Italian-born American mathematician who worked in the field of combinatorics. He was born in Vigevano, Italy in 1932 and moved to the US where he obtained his bachelors at Princeton University and his Masters and PhD from Yale University. He popularized Combinatorics as a discipline, and he did this by founding Scholarly Journals, lecturing, and publishing papers on the subject.. His work was so well appreciated, that he had 4 honorary degrees from various countries by the time he died in 1999.

Although Gian-Carlo Rota was born in Italy, he spent most of his life in the US. His family fled Italy during World War II because his father was wanted by the Fascist government. He eventually made it to Ecuador, where he graduated high school. From there he moved to the United States, where he obtained his bachelors, masters, and PhD (all in Mathematics). He was a professor at MIT for over 30 years before his death, where he taught courses in Math and Philosophy. He also did consulting work for Los Alamos National Laboratory and other companies.

Gian-Carlo Rota made the field of Combinatorics more respected and more popular in Mathematics by writing papers, teaching classes, and running scholarly journals. In the 1960s, he wrote a series of 10 papers on the Foundations of Combinatorics were influential in the acceptance of Combinatorics as a Mathematical discipline. In addition to the papers he wrote early on in his career, he was one of the main math professors for many years at MIT, one of the most prestigious universities in America. In his later years, he started a scholarly journal about Combinatorics. Some of the other major work in Mathematics he did (besides popularizing combinatorics) is his famous Rotas Conjecture about finite fields, and the concept of the Joint Spectral Radius of a matrix.

Works Cited

Gian-carlo rota won world's recognition, students' admiration. (1999, April 23). The Tech. Retrieved from http://tech.mit.edu/V119/PDF/V119-N21.pdf MIT News. (1999, April 22). Mit professor gian-carlo rota, mathematician and philosopher, is dead at 66. Retrieved from http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/1999/rota.html