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