Talk:Gian-Carlo Rota

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] (http://www.rota.org/rem/newmex.html), 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)

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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. Cd 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)