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]
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."[15] From 1967 to 1969, Kaplansky wrote the mathematics section of Encyclopædia Britannica.[16][17][18] 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.[19]
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,[20] 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.[21]
—— (September 1974). Commutative Rings. Lectures in Mathematics. University of Chicago Press.
ISBN0-226-42454-5. 1st edn. 1966; revised 1974 with several later reprintings
^MacLane, Saunders. "The Applied Mathematics Group at Columbia in World War II" in A Century of Mathematics in America, vol. 3 (ed. Peter Duren). Providence: American Mathematical Society, 1989.
^Kaplansky, I. (1967). Mathematics. In: Book of the Year: Events of 1966, 9th ed. Chicago, Toronto, London, Geneva, Sydney, Tokyo, Manila: William Benton, pp.502-503.
^Kaplansky, I. (1968). Mathematics. In: Book of the Year: Events of 1967, 9th ed. Chicago, Toronto, London, Geneva, Sydney, Tokyo, Manila: William Benton, pp.502.
^Kaplansky, I. (1969). Mathematics. In: Book of the Year: Events of 1968, 9th ed. Chicago, Toronto, London, Geneva, Sydney, Tokyo, Manila: William Benton, pp.488-489.