The Star and the Whole: Gian-Carlo Rota on Mathematics and Phenomenology, authored by Fabrizio Palombi, is the first book to study Rota s philosophical reflection. Rota (1932 1999) was a leading figure in contemporary mathematics and an outstanding philosopher, inspired by phenomenology, who made fundamental contributions to combinatorial analysis, and trained several generations of mathematicians in his long career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The first chapter of the book...