Olkin's advisor was S. N. Roy and his Ph.D. thesis was "On distribution problems in multivariate analysis" submitted in 1951.

Olkin died from complications of colorectal cancer at his home in Palo Alto, California on April 28, 2016, aged 91.

Olkin is a Guggenheim, Fulbright, and Lady Davis Fellow, with an honorary doctorate from De Montfort University.

Olkin has written many books including Statistical methods for meta-analysis, Probability theory, and Education in a Research University.

Olkin has written two books with Albert W. Marshall, Inequalities: Theory of Majorization and its Applications (1979) and Life distributions: Structure of nonparametric, semiparametric, and parametric families (2007).