Israel Nathan Herstein

Who was Israel Nathan Herstein?

Israel Nathan Herstein was a mathematician, appointed as professor at the University of Chicago in 1951. He worked on a variety of areas of algebra, including ring theory, with over 100 research papers and over a dozen books.

Herstein was born in Lublin, Poland, in 1923. His family emigrated to Canada in 1926, and he grew up in a harsh and underprivileged environment where, according to him, "you either became a gangster or a college professor." During his school years he played football, ice hockey, golf, tennis, and pool. He also 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. He received his Ph.D from Indiana University in 1948. His advisor was Max Zorn. He held positions at the University of Kansas, Ohio State University, University of Pennsylvania, and Cornell University before permanently settling at the University of Chicago in 1962.

He is known for his lucid style of writing, as exemplified by the classic and widely influential Topics in Algebra, an undergraduate introduction to abstract algebra that was published in 1964, which dominated the field for 20 years. A more advanced classic text is his Noncommutative Rings in the Carus Mathematical Monographs series. His primary interest was in noncommutative ring theory, but he also wrote papers on finite groups, linear algebra, and mathematical economics.