Gelfand, Izrail
Gel’fand, Izrail’ Moiseevich
Born Aug. 20 (Sept. 2), 1913, in the small town of Okna, now in Odessa Oblast. Soviet mathematician. Corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1953). Professor at Moscow University since 1943 and president of the Moscow Mathematical Society (1966-70).
In 1940, Gel’fand constructed the theory of commutative normed rings, which subsequently served as the starting point for the theory of rings with involution and the theory of infinite-dimensional representations of groups created by Gel’fand (with M. A. Naimark and others) His other works are devoted to the theory of generalized functions, the theory of topological linear spaces, dynamic systems, automorphic functions, inverse problems in spectral analysis, and computational methods. He has done work in the cytology and neurophysiology of the cerebellum. Gel’fand is an honorary foreign member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston, USA (1964), the London Mathematical Society (1966), the Irish Academy of Sciences (1970), and the USA National Academy of Sciences (1970). He was awarded the State Prize of the USSR in 1951.