About Irving Kaplansky
Irving Kaplansky (March 22, 1917 – June 25, 2006) was a mathematician, college professor, author, and amateur musician. == Biography == Kaplansky, or "Kap" as his friends and colleagues called him, was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, to Polish-Jewish immigrants. His father worked as a tailor, and his mother ran a grocery and, eventually, a chain of bakeries. 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. 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. 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." After receiving his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1941 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 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" with the Applied Mathematics Panel. He was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study and attended the 1946 Princeton University Bicentennial. 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." From 1967 to 1969, Kaplansky wrote the mathematics section of Encyclopædia Britannica.
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