Talk:Gian-Carlo Rota

Name

I am perfectly aware that he is quite universally known as Gian-Carlo. Simply, I was pointing that this form is not correct in his birthplace, where hyphens are formally not allowed in anagraphic bureaucracy. This even in case he himself used hyphens. You can use whatever nickname you like in your private life, but for official purposes you cannot override our terrific formalism... once we have one! :-) Gianfranco

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(Sounds like a remnant of fascism.) I have seen his last will and testament, executed under the laws of Massachusetts. I think that if it had not referred to him as "Gian-Carlo Rota", with a hyphen, I would have noticed its absence. If he had remained in Italy, perhaps that would have been officially correct, but in the USA no regulation prohibits a hyphen in this name.

Sounds like this has nothing to do with fascism.

It was a detail, added for a maybe pedantic precision. It was not crucial, indeed, so it has already been removed in order to avoid use of familiar language in the article ("one Wikipedian..."): sounds like we should better discourage creative extensions of the usual Wiki style. --Gianfranco

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I didn't mean that your comment on this Wikipedia article had anything to do with fascism; I meant that the practice of a government dictating how names should be spelled or punctuated sounds like a remnant of fascism.

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OK, he was prominent in combinatorics. What did he actually discover? --Robert Merkel 13:23, 17 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Ask and you will eventually receive.

By the way, "Juan Carlos" is from personal observation (though I knew him only very slightly) and from [1], which says he had a secret New Mexico driver's license as Juan Carlos Rota, and possibly a third secret license as well.

I think it would be nice to mention some personal quirks—not believing in evolution, taking friends to dinner, the phrase "hot air"—but someone who knew him better than me would have to do that. —JerryFriedman 23:25, 29 Sep 2004 (UTC)

On second thought, maybe that's not really appropriate for an encyclopedia article for someone who's notable as an academic. —JerryFriedman 15:03, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I think it would be appropriate. Michael Hardy 19:27, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I don't know whether the "Juan Carlos" anecdote is appropriate or not, but it is certainly misplaced in the first line of the article. I'm going to get rid of it for now. Gabriel.c.drummond.cole (talk) 23:55, 29 June 2015 (UTC)

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I may have missed a connection. Is the correspondence between combinatorics problems and finding roots of polynomials precisely what made combinatorics respectable? Is that because being algebraic is a sufficient and possibly necessary condition for respectability for a branch of mathematics? —JerryFriedman 19:36, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I don't think that's what made combinatorics respectable. To some extent, combinatorics was respectable before Rota; I think Paul Erdös had some considerable prestige and worked on combinatorial problems. Of course, no one ever disputed that some elementary combinatorics was needed to study probability theory and some other things, but it wasn't glamorous as a research field 45 years ago. Rota wrote a series of "Foundations of Combinatorial Theory" papers, most of them jointly with various other authors, that contributed a lot to changing that. Michael Hardy 19:27, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Thanks. If the connection to polynomials wasn't the main thing that changed people's views of combinatorics, then that bit of the article is probably fine the way it is. —JerryFriedman 17:35, 14 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Age at time of leaving Italy

If GC Rota was born April 27th, 1932 and left Italy aged 13, it couldn't have been because his father was being threatened by fascism. Fascism fell on April 25th, 1945. Could he have left Italy at a younger age?

Stefano.

I have wondered about the details myself; I haven't found them in any of the usual sources on Rota. I think one of his sisters wrote a book on their family's experiences during the second World War; maybe something's in that. Michael Hardy 02:36, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)

The reason given, fear of Fascism, is probably untrue. The date implied, 1945, is probably correct. The American college in Quito is said to be a secondary school, not normally having students less than 13. Rota Junior is unlikely to have entered Princeton unless he had secondary education. If he spoke some French, he might have been in Switzerland. The time in that country seems to have been short. He might have studied French separately. It is possible that the family had difficulty entering America legally from 1945 to 1950.

French is, in any case, similar to Spanish and Italian. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.97.194.200 (talk) 14:58, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

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I would say that Rota's philosophy classes focused on Phenomenology and Existentialism. He really liked Heidegger's work, the most. I think he taught Husserl mainly as a precursor to Heidegger. He did a little Sartre, as well. (I did two semesters of that course.)

He proudly claimed to be the only member of the Heidegger Society who wasn't a professional philosopher.

Sofgry 05:37, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

WikiProject class rating

This article was automatically assessed because at least one WikiProject had rated the article as start, and the rating on other projects was brought up to start class. BetacommandBot 04:03, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

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Removed dubious tag

I removed the dubious tag from the sentence claiming that Rota is credited with making combinatorics a "respectable branch of mathematics". While I realize this may sound extreme to readers today, Richard Stanley (one of the most prolific combinatorics researchers of all time and perhaps the most eminent alive today) is quoted in the MIT News article on Rota's death as saying "Gian-Carlo Rota almost single-handedly lifted the subject of combinatorics from a barely respectable obscurity to one of the most active areas of mathematics today".

If someone wants to tweak the wording of that sentence, fine, but I don't think it's fair to tag it as dubious. The claim is consistent with everything I have heard and read about Gian-Carlo Rota, including from people who lived through that era. If you dispute the claim then add a disputed tag and cite a source that disputes it.