Thread by @akoz33

#OTD in 1913 was born one of the greatest mathematicians and scientists of the 20-th century and, undoubtedly , of all time - Israel Moiseevich Gelfand. Gelfand’s contributions to mathematics are enormous: over 800 papers on a variety of

areas of mathematics, over 800 papers and 20 monographs on functional analysis, topology, algebra, group representation theory, generalized functions, probability theory and applications to physics (especially quantum mechanics) and above all to mathematical biology, where he

created entire research areas and institutes. What makes Gelfand’s achievements even more incredible is the fact that he was largely self-taught and never completed his high school education.
He is also the most remarkable exemplar of the antisemitism that prevailed in the

Soviet mathematical establishment throughout the existence of the Soviet Union.
Gelfand was born in a Jewish family in a small town between Moldova and the Odessa district of Ukraine. After learning in a Jewish school he entered a Ukrainian and Russian ones. His family then moved

to another part of Ukraine, where he entered a secondary school for professional chemists. There he became friends with another future famous Jewish mathematician, David Milman. Both boys showed remarkable mathematical abilities. Both were expelled in 1928 as “non-proletarian

element”. This is why Gelfand never completed high school education. In 1930 Gelfand moved to Moscow to live with relatives: for some time he was unemployed, later worked as a physical laborer. Amazingly he was able to study mathematics by himself and in 1931 started attending

evening classes at several universities in Moscow. He was noticed by one of USSR’s greatest mathematicians Andrey Kolmogorov and, in spite of lacking any formal qualifications, was appointed his assistant. Later Kolmogorov would say to his student Arnold that Gelfand was one of

only two mathematicians in conversation with whom he felt he was in the presence of a superior intellect. Thanks to Kolmogorov Gelfand became a professor of USSR’s most prestigious university MGU, he headed a special section of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and became a

Corresponding Member of the Academy. By 1960 he was universally recognised as a leading member of the magnificent Moscow School of mathematics and one of the world’s greatest mathematicians. But in spite of Kolmogorov’s great efforts all attempts to make Gelfand a full member of

the Academy were refused. Gelfand was also not allowed to travel abroad in spite of being awarded prizes and honorary doctorates by the most prestigious foreign universities. The reason was that Soviet mathematics was dominated by two powerful antisemitic figures

(and very good mathematicians) I.M. Vinogradov and L.Sl Pontryagin, both with powerful connections in the Central Committee of the CPSU. Vinogradov was a visceral antisemite, who studied the ancestry of all Soviet mathematicians do detect any Jewish ancestors.

Pontryagin was more subtle, according to Arnold the most likely cause of his antisemitism was a reasonable fear that he himself may have had Jewish ancestry. The two of them together with less distinguished associated decided on a policy that no more than one Jew could be at one

time a full member of the Academy of the Sciences. This Jewish position was occupied by S.N. Bernstein. After he died, it was awarded to L.V. Kantorovich (Nobel prize winner in economics) and only after his death in 1984, Gelfand.
The policy of not allowing Jews to travel abroad

was also largely due to Vinogradov and Pontryagin. Amazingly they also opposed awarding Field’s medals to Soviet Jewish mathematicians - preferring that they should go to foreigners. They manage to prevent Arnold getting one(Gelfand was already over 40 so could not be considered)

but later a several Soviet Jewish mathematicians received them, though they were not allowed to collect them in person.
It should be added that the situation was quite different in Soviet physics, due to the great influence of Pyotr Kapitsa, who strongly & outspokenly opposed

antisemitism.
I myself first came across Gelfand’s work as an undergraduate student - in functional analysis we studied the theory of C* algebras and the Gelfand-Naimark Theorem. The elegance and depth of this result, so characteristic of Gelfand’s work was striking even at an

graduate level. In 1973 Michael Atiyah, at that time a Royal Societ Resrarch professor at Oxford and one of the world’s best and also most influential mathematicians succeeded in something no one else could achieve up to this time and managed to get a permission for Gelfand to

come to Oxford to receive an honorary doctorate. Atiyah’s most famous mathematical result, the Atiyah-Singer Index Theorem was actually a result originally conjectured by Gelfand. The two were steadfast friends. One year later I began my postgraduate work at Oxford. My supervisor

was to be Atiyah’s student Graeme Segal, but in the first semester he was in Moscow, visiting Gelfand, so Aliyah agreed to replace him. I had several meetings with him, each a memorable experience. Aliyah was receiving pre-prints from Gelfand but they were in Russian, which

Aliyah did not know, so he asked me to explain them to him. Of course I could not understand any of the mathematics but jointly we manage to work out the main points (basically I translated a few words and Ativan guessed the rest). Later I wrote my mystery thesis basically

explaining one of these papers.
Besides mathematics, Gelfand made important contributions to bioinformatics, neurophysiology and medicine. His interest in these areas had its origin in the death of his younger son Sasha from leukemia. In 1960 Gelfand became director of the

Institute of Biophysics of the Academy of Sciences of USSR. His work on these subjects was important but I know very little about it.
Gelfand was also a close friend and collaborator of the great physicist and famous dissident Andrei Sakharov. Although Gelfand’s human rights

activity consisted chiefly of interventions on behalf individual persecuted scientists and mathematicians, in 1968 he was one of the signatories of a letter condemning the invasion of Czechoslovakia. In the same year he signed the so called “letter 99” protesting against the

confining the dissident mathematician Alexander Esenin-Volpin in a psychiatric institution.
In 1989 Gelfand emigrated to the United States and became a professor of mathematics at Rutgers University, where he continued his famous Moscow seminar. He also set up “The Gelfand

Correspondence Program in Mathematics” - analogous to the correspondence school for senior High Schoolers which he directed in Moscow. He died in New Brunswick on 5th October 2009.