Israel Moiseevich Gelfand Vladimir Retakh, Coordinating Editor

Gelfand with grandaughter. Israel Moiseevich Gelfand, a mathematician compared by Henri Cartan to Poincaré and Hilbert, was born on September 2, 1913, in the small town of Okny (later Red Okny) near Odessa in the Ukraine and died in New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA, on October 5, 2009. Nobody guided Gelfand in his studies. He attended the only school in town, and his mathematics teacher could offer him nothing except encouragement—and this was very important. In Gelfand’s own words: “Offering encouragement is a teacher’s most important job.” In 1923 the family moved to another place and Gelfand entered a vocational school for chemistry lab technicians. However, he was expelled in the ninth grade as a son of a “bourgeois element” (“netrudovoi element” in Soviet parlance)—his father was a mill manager. After that Gelfand (he was sixteen and a half at that time) decided to go to Moscow, where he had some distant relatives. Until his move to Moscow in 1930, Gelfand lived in total mathematical isolation. The only books