Israel Moiseevich Gel’fand (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.
Introducing the GNS construction:
Israel Gelfand, Mark Naimark, On the imbedding of normed rings into the ring of operators on a Hilbert space, Matematicheskii Sbornik. 12 (2): 197–217 (1943)
reprinted in:
Robert Doran (ed.), -Algebras: 1943–1993, Contemporary Mathematics 167, AMS 1994 (doi:10.1090/conm/167)
Last revised on June 25, 2022 at 17:07:20. See the history of this page for a list of all contributions to it.