[4] Isaacs completed his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1964 under Richard Brauer.
[1][2][3][4] The Mathematics Genealogy Project lists him as having had 29 doctoral students.
[9][10][11] Isaacs is also the author of the book Algebra: A Graduate Course (first published in 1994; republished in 2009),[12] which received highly positive reviews.
[3] In 2009, a conference was held at the Universitat de Valencia in Spain to honor his contributions.
He received the Benjamin Smith Reynolds award for teaching engineering students at the University of Wisconsin and a UW Madison campus teaching award.