Israel Gelfand
Israel Moiseevich Gel'fand (Израиль Моисеевич Гельфанд) (born 1913 in Okny, Kherson in Ukraine then part of the Russian Empire) is a prolific mathematician in the field of functional analysis, which he interprets in a broad sense as the mathematics of quantum mechanics. He has collaborated on papers with many mathematicians in Moscow, where he ran a seminar. In 1990 he took up a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He also for a long time took an interest in cell biology.
He is known for many developments including:
- the Gelfand representation in Banach algebra theory;
- the Gel'fand-Naimark theorem;
- the Gelfand-Naimark-Segal construction
- the representation theory of the complex classical Lie groups;
- contributions to distribution theory and measures on infinite-dimensional spaces;
- the first observation of the connection of automorphic forms with representations (with Fomin);
- conjectures about the index theorem;
- Ordinary Differential Equations (Gel'fand-Levitan theory);
- work on calculus of variations and soliton theory (Gel'fand-Dikii equations);
- contributions to the philosophy of cusp forms;
- Gel'fand-Fuks cohomology of foliations;
- Gel'fand-Kirillov dimension;
- integral geometry;
- combinatorial definition of the Pontryagin class;
- Coxeter functors;
- generalised hypergeometric series;
and many other results, particularly in the representation theory for the classical groups.
He also worked extensively in mathematics education, particularly with correspondence education. He was awarded a MacArthur fellowship for this work.