The digital footprint of Gian-Carlo Rota
16-18 February 2009 - Milan, Italy
The conference is a tribute to the memory of Gian-Carlo Rota, one of the most influential mathematicians of the second half of the 20th century, a founder of modern Combinatorics, and a developer of the philosophical line of thought rooted in the research of Husserl, Heidegger, and Ortega y Gasset.
Gian-Carlo Rota's intellectual footprint lies at the crossroads between modern mathematics, phenomenology, and advanced computer science. His legacy is still fostering innovative research in multiple fields.
Gian-Carlo Rota's activity both in the US and in Europe (with a special attention to Italy) established a strong link between research communities on different sides of the Atlantic whose effects are still felt to these days.
The art of guessing results and solving problems without doing a proof or an exact calculation. Techniques include extreme-cases reasoning, dimensional analysis, successive approximation, discretization, generalization, and pictorial analysis. Application to mental calculation, solid geometry, musical intervals, logarithms, integration, infinite series, solitaire, and differential equations.
R. Wille. Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Conceptual Structures (ICCS 2009), volume 5662 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, page 66-85. Springer, (2009)