Portrait of Irving Kaplansky

Birthday profile

Irving Kaplansky

Irving Kaplansky, Canadian-American mathematician and academic (died 2006)

Born
March 22, 1917
Died
June 25, 2006
Zodiac sign
Aries
Birth year
1917

About Irving Kaplansky

Irving Kaplansky was a mathematician, college professor, author, and amateur musician. 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. 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.

Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.

The world when Irving Kaplansky was born

Irving Kaplansky was born in 1917. The year snapshot below places that birthday in its cultural and historical setting: the music and films people were following, the headlines shaping public life, and the everyday prices families encountered.

Culture in 1917

  • Best-selling book"Mr. Britling Sees It Through" – H.G. Wells

Headlines and milestones

  • Major sports momentProfessional sports curtailed as America enters World War I
  • Top headlineUS enters World War I
  • Technology milestoneFirst practical military use of sonar
  • World population~1.77B

United States snapshot

  • U.S. leaderWoodrow Wilson
  • U.S. population100.8M

1917 versus 2026

These figures put everyday life in Irving Kaplansky's birth year beside the site's latest United States snapshot.

Measure19172026
Gas$0.25$3.45/gal
Population100.8M341 million

Sources and editorial standards

This profile combines a biographical source with structured birthday and historical context. Sources recorded for this profile: Wikipedia, Library of Congress, Wikidata. See our editorial policy for sourcing, corrections, and review standards.

Read the source biography on Wikipedia. Wikipedia text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.