Irving Kaplansky

Irving Kaplansky, a retired Professor of Mathematics at the University of Chicago and a leading authority on algebra, died , June 25.Kaplansky loved working with young people, and he served as Ph.D. advisor to 55 graduate students, the most of any mathematics professor ever to have taught at the University of Chicago.He published close to 150 papers, the earliest appearing in 1939 and the last in 2003.Kaplansky received the prestigious Steele Prize in 1989 from the American Mathematical Society for his career-long influence on mathematics. The citation said he received the honor “for his lasting impact on mathematics, particularly mathematics in America.His research was devoted primarily to algebra and functional analysis. He contributed many basic results on the structure of Banach algebras, on locally compact groups and on group representations.He also did fundamental work on ring theory and wrote important books, among them, Commutative Rings (1970), Infinite Abelian Groups (1969) and Lie Algebras and Locally Compact Groups (1971).From 1957 to 1961, he was editor of the Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society.