Dave Haan
aka nnyhav
- Joined
- 11/19/08
- Messages
- 72
- Points
- 18
from ams news, via Terry Tao:Israil Moiseevich Gelfand, one of the most influential mathematicians of the 20th century, died October 5 at the age of 96. He was the author of more than 800 articles and 30 books in many areas of mathematics--including commutative normed rings, representation theory, generalized functions, and partial differential equations ...
http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2009/10/07/israel-gelfand/
I found his Calculus of Variations (w/ S.V. Fomin, in trans) clear and useful, but that's old work (Dover reprint) ... he's in the roots of many branches of mathematics now getting attention in finance.