Israel Gelfand

Israel Moiseevich Gelfand (??????? ????????? ????????) (born in 1913) is a prolific mathematician in the field of functional analysis, which he interprets in a broad sense as the mathematics of quantum mechanics.

Related Topics:
1913 - Mathematician - Functional analysis - Quantum mechanics

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He was born into a Jewish family in Okny, Kherson region in Ukraine then part of the Russian Empire.

Related Topics:
Jewish - Okny - Kherson - Ukraine - Russian Empire

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He has collaborated on papers with many mathematicians in Moscow, where he ran a seminar. In 1990 he took up a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He also for a long time took an interest in cell biology.

Related Topics:
Moscow - 1990 - Rutgers University - New Jersey - Cell biology

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He is known for many developments including:

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• the Gelfand representation in Banach algebra theory;
• the Gelfand-Naimark theorem;
• the Gelfand-Naimark-Segal construction
• the representation theory of the complex classical Lie groups;
• contributions to distribution theory and measures on infinite-dimensional spaces;
• the first observation of the connection of automorphic forms with representations (with Fomin);
• conjectures about the index theorem;
• Ordinary Differential Equations (Gelfand-Levitan theory);
• work on calculus of variations and soliton theory (Gelfand-Dikii equations);
• contributions to the philosophy of cusp forms;
• Gelfand-Fuks cohomology of foliations;
• Gelfand-Kirillov dimension;
• integral geometry;
• combinatorial definition of the Pontryagin class;
• Coxeter functors;
• generalised hypergeometric series;

and many other results, particularly in the representation theory for the classical groups.

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He also worked extensively in mathematics education, particularly with correspondence education. He was awarded a MacArthur fellowship for this work.

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