Israel Nathan Herstein (1923–1988)

Israel Nathan Herstein was born to a Jewish family in Lublin, Poland. In 1926, when he was three years old, his family emigrated to Canada. Herstein grew up during the Great Depression in a poor and tough area of Winnipeg, Manitoba. During his school years. he played numerous sports, including football, ice hockey, and tennis. He also sometimes worked as a steeplejack and as a barker at a fair. He received his B.S. degree from the University of Manitoba and his M.A. from the University of Toronto. In 1948, he received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Indiana University with German-born mathematician Max Zorn as his thesis advisor. He held academic appointments at the University of Kansas, The Ohio State University, University of Pennsylvania, and Cornell University before permanently settling at the University of Chicago in 1962. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1960–1961. Herstein was known for his beautifully clear style of writing, exemplified by his widely-used textbook Topics in Algebra, first published in 1964. His own work included pioneering advances in the theory of rings, an algebraic system. He wrote more than 100 research papers and a dozen books. He supervised some 30 doctoral students, who included Miriam Cohen, Wallace S. Martindale, Susan Montgomery, Karen Parshall, and Claudio Procesi. Prof. Herstein traveled and lectured widely, and spoke Italian, Hebrew, Polish, and Portuguese. He was married to Marianne Deson, and later to Barbara Cortzen, a mathematician at De Paul University in Chicago.