nLab
Israel Gelfand

Israel Gelfand (Израиль Гельфанд, 1913–2009) played a preeminent role in Russian mathematics for many years. His legendary seminar in Moscow ran for 50 years, and set the pattern for many others, including Sullivan’s seminar at CUNY and Drinfeld’s at Chicago. His name is attached to many mathematical achievements, including

• the Gelfand representation? of a Banach algebra,

• an important special case, the Gelfand-Naimark theorem? describing commutative C*-algebras,

• the Gelfand-Naimark-Segal construction? describing general C-algebras,

• the Gelfand-Fuks cohomology? of a foliation,

• the Gelfand-Kirillov dimension? of an associative algebra,

• the Bernstein-Gelfand-Gelfand resolution? for representations of simple Lie groups.

He helped write a 5-volume work on distribution theory.

category: people