Irving Kaplansky, 89; Math Professor Was an Authority on Algebra

Irving Kaplansky, 89, a leading authority on algebra and a retired professor of mathematics at the University of Chicago, died June 25 of respiratory failure at his home in Sherman Oaks, his family said.

From 1939 to 2003, Kaplansky published nearly 150 papers. His research was devoted primarily to algebra and functional analysis. He also did fundamental work on ring theory and wrote several leading books on the subject, 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. In 1965, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

A native of Toronto, Kaplansky earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Toronto and his PhD from Harvard. He joined the University of Chicago faculty in 1945 and was appointed a full professor in 1956. He took emeritus status in 1984. That same year, Kaplansky was named director of the Mathematics Science Research Institute in Berkeley. He held the post until 1992.