The proposed conference "I. M. Gelfand Centennial conference: A view of 21st century mathematics" will be held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on August 28 - September 2, 2013. It will be a major gathering of mathematicians working in a large variety of fields, which will review some of the most significant advances in mathematics since the turn of the century, and commemorate the late I. M. Gelfand, a giant of modern mathematics, on the occasion of the centennial of his birth. The speakers at the conference are mostly mathematicians who have obtained fundamental results in the last ten years in areas that would be have been of interest to Gelfand, but not necessarily close to his work or the work of his students.
I. M. Gelfand was one of the geniuses who laid the foundation for the main ideas of modern mathematics. He also created a unique school known for its breadth, open-mindedness and originality. The success of Gelfand's school was based on his remarkable ability to discover talented young students, to educate them, and to work in harmony with young and established researchers. The conference will continue this tradition by attracting outstanding mathematicians and will include many graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. The latter groups will especially benefit from the broad spectrum of the topics and big ideas to be presented at the conference. The slides of the talks and other conference information will be disseminated through its website, which will allow the discussed ideas to reach a wide audience throughout the world. The conference website is available at http://math.mit.edu/conferences/Gelfand/index.php
". The conference was of great interest for a general mathematical audience, and included talks by the top researchers in many fields of mathematics and mathematical physics, such as representation theory, algebraic number theory, cluster algebras, homotopy theory, categorification, algebraic geometry, dynamical systems, symplectic topology, quantum field theory, string theory, homological algebra, complex and symplectic geometry, and others. There was also a "Gelfand Legacy" session, where leading mathematicians explained how ideas of Gelfand and his school influenced the development of modern mathematics. There was also a historical session. These session were very useful for students and the general mathematical audience. During the conference the very top experts in many fields reviewed the main developments in this field in the last 10 years, and outlined directions of further development, which constituted its intellectual merit. The conference attracted about 300 participants, most of them graduate students and young scholars. At least 35% of funding was used to support women, minorities, young scholars, and graduate students. The talks were recorded as high-quality videos and will be put online very soon. This constitutes broader impacts of the project.
