Years ago

✍ Scribed by Allen Shields

• Book ID: 112974815
• Publisher: Springer-Verlag
• Year: 1989
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 424 KB
• Volume: 11
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0343-6993
• DOI: 10.1007/bf03025184

✦ Synopsis

In a remarkable series of three notes written fifty years ago in the Doklady Akad. Nauk, I. M. Gel'fand [1939] sketched the theory of commutative Banach algebras together with its principal applications. This was apparently his doctoral dissertation (in the bibliography of Silov [19401] the dissertation title is given as: The theory of normed rings). According to Mat XL, vol. II, Gel'fand was born 20 August 1913 in the Odessa region; he received the degree of Candidate in 1935 and the degree of Doctor in 1940. The Candidate of Science degree is equivalent to an American Ph.D., while the Doctorate is a more advanced degree. As happens only very rarely in mathematics, this new theory was essentially the creation of one person.

Just preceding these Doklady notes, there was a joint paper by Gel'fand and Kolmogorov [1939] entitled On rings of continuous functions on topological spaces. In it