Israel Gelfand (1913-2009) was a Russian mathematician, one of the greatest of the 20th century. He obtained his Phd from Moscow State University in 1935 under the supervision of Andrei Kolmogorov,
He left the Soviet Union in 1989 and became a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Rutgers University. His name is attached to many foundamental results of functional analysis and representation theory. Gelfand duality establishes a duality between the category of commutative C-star algebras and the category of compact spaces. It is the archetype of a duality between commutative algebras and geometry which plays an important role in algebraic geometry.