I don't think I saw any mention of it here, but Kaplansky passed away little over one month ago, on June 25. Here's a link to a nice obituary . . . but I wasn't able to extract specific results of his from this:
< http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20060714/news_1m14kaplansk.html>
Actually, I'm curious -- if any cognoscenti would care to explain some theorems he's famous for, I'd be very interested.
i'm afraid i can't really do it justice, but there hasn't been much response, so i thought i'd try. one result of his i know is that a projective module over a (non-commumtative) local ring is free. it's possible that the finitely generated version predates him, and the general case is his contribution. also, his book "infinite abelian groups" is well-known. (oops, i see that's mentioned in the obit.) mike