Israel Gelfand

Israel Gelfand

1913–2009

Unlike most of his mathematician colleagues, Israel Gelfand did not specialize in any single discipline. Instead, he became one of the 20th century’s mathematical giants by doing work in more than a dozen areas, including integral geometry and representation theory. His research has found application in fields as varied as medical imaging and quantum physics.

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Gelfand was born in Ukraine, said the Los Angeles Times. “At 15, he contracted appendicitis, which then required a 12-day stay in the hospital. On the way there he asked his parents to buy him a calculus text, and he mastered it in his bed.” In 1940 he received his doctorate at Moscow State University and three years later established a “legendary” math seminar, “held every Monday night for nearly 50 years on the 14th floor of the Moscow university building.”

Open to everyone from high school students to colleagues, the seminar was “more like math improv,” said The New York Times, “with Gelfand interrupting with questions, observations, and sometimes cutting remarks.” The seminar would start at 7 p.m. and often last past midnight. “You have to be fast only to catch fleas,” he explained. Gelfand wrote widely, publishing more than 600 papers and books. “His studies on Banach algebras and infinite-dimensional representations of Lie groups have become standard fare in advanced textbooks.”

In 1989, Gelfand left the Soviet Union for the U.S., where he joined the Rutgers faculty. His many honors included a MacArthur “genius grant” and the Wolf Prize, mathematics’ equivalent of the Nobel.