Irving Kaplansky

Kaplansky or "Kap" as his friends and colleagues called him was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, to Polish-Jewish immigrants;[3][4] his father worked as a tailor, and his mother ran a grocery and, eventually, a chain of bakeries.[5][6][7] He went to Harbord Collegiate Institute receiving the Prince of Wales Scholarship as a teenager. He attended the University of Toronto as an undergraduate and finished first in his class for three consecutive years.[8] In his senior year, he competed in the first William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, becoming one of the first five recipients of the Putnam Fellowship, which paid for graduate studies at Harvard University.[5] Administered by the Mathematical Association of America, the competition is widely considered to be the most difficult mathematics examination in the world and "its difficulty is such that the median score is often zero or one (out of 120) despite being attempted by students specializing in mathematics." [9] There have been approximately 150,000 participants since 1938 with only four recorded perfect scores. Kaplansky only got one question wrong ranking his performance amongst the highest recorded.[9]

After receiving his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1941[1] as Saunders Mac Lane's first student, he remained at Harvard as a Benjamin Peirce Instructor, and in 1944 moved with Mac Lane to Columbia University for one year to collaborate on work surrounding World War II [10] working on "miscellaneous studies in mathematics applied to warfare analysis with emphasis upon aerial gunnery, studies of fire control equipment, and rocketry and toss bombing" [11] with the Applied Mathematics Panel.[12][13]

He was professor of mathematics at the University of Chicago from 1945 to 1984, and Chair of the department from 1962 to 1967. In 1968, Kaplansky was presented an honorary doctoral degree from Queen's University with the university noting “we honour as a Canadian whose clarity of lectures, elegance of writing, and profundity of research have won him widespread acclaim as the greatest mathematician this country has so far produced.”[14] From 1967 to 1969, Kaplansky wrote the mathematics section of Encyclopædia Britannica.[15][16] [17] Kaplansky was the Director of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute from 1984 to 1992, and the President of the American Mathematical Society from 1985 to 1986.[18]

Kaplansky was also an accomplished amateur musician. He had perfect pitch, studied piano until the age of 15, earned money in high school as a dance band musician, taught Tom Lehrer,[19] and played in Harvard's jazz band in graduate school. He also had a regular program on Harvard's student radio station. After moving to the University of Chicago, he stopped playing for two decades, but then returned to music as an accompanist for student-run Gilbert and Sullivan productions and as a calliope player in football game parades.[5] He often composed music based on mathematical themes. One of those compositions, A Song About Pi, is a melody based on assigning notes to the first 14 decimal places of pi, and has occasionally been performed by his daughter, singer-songwriter Lucy Kaplansky.[20]

Kaplansky made major contributions to group theory, ring theory, the theory of operator algebras and field theory and created the Kaplansky density theorem, Kaplansky's game and Kaplansky conjecture. He published more than 150 articles and over 20 mathematical books.[2]

Kaplansky was the doctoral supervisor of 55 students including notable mathematicians Hyman Bass, Susanna S. Epp, Günter Lumer, Eben Matlis, Donald Ornstein, Ed Posner, Alex F. T. W. Rosenberg, Judith D. Sally, and Harold Widom. He has over 900 academic descendants, including many through his academic grandchildren David J. Foulis (who studied with Kaplansky at the University of Chicago before completing his doctorate under the supervision of Kaplansky's student Fred Wright, Jr.) and Carl Pearcy (the student of H. Arlen Brown, who had been jointly supervised by Kaplansky and Paul Halmos).[1]

Kaplansky was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Director of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, and President of the American Mathematical Society. He was the plenary speaker at the British Mathematical Colloquium in 1966. Won the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Jeffery–Williams Prize, and the Leroy P. Steele Prize.[13][21]

• Kaplansky's theorem on projective modules

• Albert, Nancy E. (2007). "Irving Kaplansky: Some Reflections on His Early Years" (PDF). Retrieved 2008-06-27. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
• Peterson, Ivars. (2013). "A Song about Pi" http://mtarchive.blogspot.com/2013/09/a-song-about-pi.html?m=1
• Freund, Peter G. O. Irving Kaplansky and Supersymmetry. arXiv:physics/0703037
• Bass, Hyman; Lam, T.Y. (December 2007). "Irving Kaplansky (1917–2006)" (PDF). Notices of the American Mathematical Society. 54 (11): 1477–1493. Retrieved 2008-01-05.
• Kadison, Richard V. (February 2008). "Irving Kaplansky's Role in Mid-Twentieth Century Functional Analysis" (PDF). Notices of the AMS. 55 (2): 216–225. Retrieved 2008-01-05.

• O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Irving Kaplansky", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews.
• Pearce, Jeremy (July 13, 2006). "Irving Kaplansky, 89, a Pioneer in Mathematical Exploration". The New York Times. p. C15. Retrieved 2008-01-05.
• Irving Kaplansky + Ternary Quadratic Forms
• Irving Kaplansky + Lie Superalgebras
• search on author Irving Kaplansky from Google Scholar