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Rota
Gian-Carlo Rota (April 27, 1932 - April 18, 1999) was an
Italian-born American mathematician and philosopher.
He was born in Vigevano, Italy, where he
lived until he was 13 years old. At that time his family fled Italy because his father, Giovanni Rota, was likely to be an object
of fascist persecution.
He attended the Colegio Americano de Quito
in Ecuador, and earned degrees at Princeton University and Yale University.
For most of his career he was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was the only person ever to be
appointed Professor of Applied Mathematics and Philosophy. He was also the Norbert Wiener Professor of
Applied Mathematics. (See also Norbert Wiener.)
He began his career as a functional analyst, but changed
directions and became a distinguished combinatorialist. He inaugurated
the theory of incidence algebras (which generalize the
19th-century theory of Möbius inversion), 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.
He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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