Konrad Jacobs · CC BY-SA 2.0 de
Israel Gelfand
Soviet-American mathematician
1913 – 2009aged 96
A mathematician whose work reshaped group theory, representation theory, and functional analysis, Gelfand spent decades at Moscow State University before immigrating to the United States near his 76th birthday to continue at Rutgers. He won the first Wolf Prize in Mathematics and a MacArthur Fellowship, and trained a lineage of prominent mathematicians — including his own son — that extended his influence well past his own published proofs.