A four-day conference, "Functional Analysis on the Eve of the Twenty-
First Century," was held at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New
Jersey, from October 24 to 27, 1993, in honor of the eightieth birthday
of Professor Israel Moiseyevich Gelfand. He was born in Krasnye Okna,
near Odessa, on September 2, 1913. Israel Gelfand has played a crucial
role in the development of functional analysis during the last
half-century. His work and his philosophy have in fact helped to shape
our understanding of the term "functional analysis" itself, as has the
celebrated journal Functional Analysis and Its Applications, which he
edited for many years. Functional analysis appeared at the beginning of
the century in the classic papers of Hilbert on integral operators. Its
crucial aspect was the geometric interpretation of families of functions
as infinite-dimensional spaces, and of op- erators (particularly
differential and integral operators) as infinite-dimensional analogues
of matrices, directly leading to the geometrization of spectral theory.
This view of functional analysis as infinite-dimensional geometry
organically included many facets of nineteenth-century classical
analysis, such as power series, Fourier series and integrals, and other
integral transforms.