Israel Gelfand
His legacy continues through his students, who include Endre Szemerédi, Alexandre Kirillov, Edward Frenkel,[1] Joseph Bernstein, David Kazhdan, as well as his own son, Sergei Gelfand.A native of Kherson Governorate, Russian Empire (now, Odesa Oblast, Ukraine), Gelfand was born into a Jewish family in the small southern Ukrainian town of Okny.Bypassing both high school and college, he proceeded to postgraduate study at the age of 19 at Moscow State University, where his advisor was the preeminent mathematician Andrei Kolmogorov.In an October 2003 article in The New York Times, written on the occasion of his 90th birthday, Gelfand is described as a scholar who is considered "among the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century",[17] having exerted a tremendous influence on the field both through his own works and those of his students.His death was first reported on the blog of his former collaborator Andrei Zelevinsky[18] and confirmed a few hours later by an obituary in the Russian online newspaper Polit.ru.