Israil Gelfand, modern hero of mathematics

I first met Gelfand at the International Congress of Mathematics, Moscow, 1966. At a reception on the first day, he stood at the end of a large room, and the visitors politely formed a loose queue to have a word with this legendary figure. I was with P. M. Cohn; I was impressed that Gelfand knew of Cohn's work on rings, on which Gelfand complimented him, for having solved an outstanding problem that arose in Gelfand's own work. He also knew of my book with Wightman. I might have seen Gelfand in 1972, during the special Moscow conference on mathematical physics.

I met Gelfand again when he came to England to receive an honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford. The next day he visited the London Mathematical Society, and gave a talk about representing groups of maps from a group to the reals. He kindly mentioned my work of 1968 and subsequent papers. The next day he visited Cambridge, where Adams and Hodge had organised a conference on geometry. Gelfand had pursuaded the conference organisers to allow him to give a seminar after tea, beginning at 16.00 hrs. I went down to Cambridge by car with two colleagues. In the Moscow style, Gelfand spoke for about two hours; again, he made the representation of groups of maps his main theme. After the first hour, I began to feel that the geometers did not approve of his lecture.

After the lecture, it was past six oclock, and I went down to the front to say hello. Gelfand greeted me warmly, and then looked around for his Cambridge hosts, who had invited him to dinner in the College that was hosting the conference. But all the audience except for me and my two colleagues had left the room. We went out into the courtyard (the lecture was in the new history building), but no-one even remotely looking like a mathematician was to be seen. I rushed into the road, but there was no-one. So Gelfand asked me to take him to the dinner (I had to explain that I and my friends had not been invited). The trouble was, he could not remember the name of the college he was supposed to go to. I did not know all the colleges by name, and so could only suggest we walk down the road and look out for crowds of geometers. After a bit, Gelfand perked up: we were passing the end of Pembroke Street, and he was sure that Pembroke College was the right place. We found our way into the dining hall, only to be told by the waitress that the serving of the meal was over. I had to insist that she try again: Gelfand had ordered a vegetarian meal, so where was it? Then she remembered this, and told us that since no-one had claimed it, it had been thrown away. I asked her if she could find him something else. She sat us down at the other end of the long hall, away from the conference diners, and presented Gelfand with a half-used serving bowl of mashed potatoes, and made off, leaving him to eat it with the enormous silver serving spoon. Gelfand would not let us leave him. He said that he was a celiac, and should avoid starch, but that one could only die once. That over, I got another waiter to give him a bowl of ice-cream (again, not allowed by his diet), but this waiter too left us without any cutlery. So Gelfand deliberately ate the ice-cream with the enormous spoon, exaggerating the arm movements as soon as he saw, out of the corner of the eye, that Hodge and Adams were coming over, having finished their coffee, asking "where did you get to?". By the time I got back to the car, which was on a four-hour meter, I had been given a ticket.