Gelfand

Gelfand is a surname meaning "elephant" in the Yiddish language and may refer to:

• People:
  • Alan Gelfand, the inventor of the ollie, a skateboarding move
  • Boris Gelfand, a chess grandmaster
  • Israel Gelfand, a mathematician
  • Vladimir Gelfand, a Soviet-Jewish writer
  • Saul Gelfand, a professor of Electrical Engineering at Purdue University

• Notions in mathematics (named after Israel above):
  • the Gelfand representation, in mathematics, allows a complete characterization of commutative C*-algebras as algebras of continuous complex-valued functions
  • the Gelfand–Naimark–Segal construction
  • the Gelfand–Naimark theorem
  • the Gelfand–Mazur theorem
  • a Gelfand pair, a pair (G,K) consisting of a locally compact unimodular group G and a compact subgroup K
  • a Gelfand triple, a construction designed to link the distribution (test function) and square-integrable aspects of functional analysis