Israel Gelfand

Israel Gelfand was a Soviet and American mathematician who lived from 1913 to 2009 and is counted among the leading mathematicians of the twentieth century. Born into a Jewish family in Okny, in what is now Ukraine, he went straight to postgraduate study at Moscow State University at the age of nineteen, with Andrei Kolmogorov as his advisor, and received his doctorate in 1935. He made significant contributions to group theory, representation theory and functional analysis, co-wrote a book on the calculus of variations with Sergei Fomin, and also worked as a biologist and as a teacher and organizer of mathematical education. He won the first Wolf Prize in 1978, became a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1977, and after moving to the United States in 1989 was a professor at Rutgers University.