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The natural sciences, God, and Jewish philosophy were all part of the mathematical equation for the late Dr. Israel Gelfand, a Rutgers professor for two decades and one of the leaders of his field.

Gelfand died Oct. 5 in New Brunswick at age 96. After leaving the Soviet Union in 1989, he served one year as a visiting professor at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before joining Rutgers, where students and faculty members alike soaked in the weekly math seminars he brought over from Moscow.

While most of his contemporaries chose to specialize in algebra, geometry, or numbers theory, Gelfand’s colleagues said he viewed mathematics as a whole and contributed in a variety of areas. Even beyond that, he fused math with his other fields of expertise, namely biology, to lay the groundwork for medical imaging technology such as CAT scans and MRIs.

Yet Gelfand’s mathematical apparatus also incorporated spirituality and Judaism. Rutgers math professors said Gelfand used the work of Jewish philosopher Martin Buber and Hassidic stories as sources of wisdom, namely a parable that quoted Rabbi Zusya as saying, “When I reach the next world, God will not ask me, Why were you not Moses? Instead, he will ask me, Why were you not Zusya?”

And according to Gelfand’s wife of 30 years, Tatiana, he “believed that God was in each of us.”

“He was just able to connect each of us to our light, our light from within,” Tatiana said.

Pushed out of a full-time professorship at Moscow State University because he was a Jew, and elected to the Soviet Academy of Sciences only as a second-tier corresponding member, Gelfand started a correspondence school “to teach students who were not able to go to universities,” Tatiana explained. A mathematician herself, Tatiana owned Gelfand’s books on functions and graphs as well as methods of coordinates, but she first met him after taking a nine-hour train ride to hear a biology seminar he gave in Moscow.

“I didn’t even know that he was a great mathematician or anything,” Tatiana said. “I thought, well, someone named Gelfand wrote these books on math for students.”

For Gelfand, math was not artificial or technical, but a way of learning what is around us, Tatiana said. Gelfand’s fascination with all forms of life led him to become a vegan for the last 10 years of his life, she said.

“One dinner, he just said ‘I will not eat the chicken’ that I cooked, and that was it,” Tatiana said.

Gelfand wrote more than 800 papers and 30 books, Tatiana said. While at Rutgers, he published more than 50 papers in mathematics, pursued research on the structure of proteins, and received accolades such as the MacArthur Award in 1994, the Russian State Prize in 1997, and the Leroy P. Steel Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the American Mathematical Society in 2005.

Born in Ukraine, Gelfand never attended high school and didn’t attend college. Nevertheless, after his parents sent him to Moscow, Gelfand started attending math seminars and was already teaching the subject by age 17 or 18, his son Sergei Gelfand said. Better yet, Gelfand’s students at the time were in their 30s and 40s, usually at least twice his age, Sergei said.

“He learned a lot about how you explain stuff to people who don’t know anything,” Sergei, a publisher with the American Mathematical Society in Providence, R.I, said.

“He liked to teach, he liked to explain to people, he knew what people were capable of doing,” he added.

At age 19, despite his lack of an undergraduate degree, mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov accepted Gelfand under his wing as a graduate student, Sergei said. Regarding the Soviet Union’s disrespect for Gelfand because he was a Jew, Sergei said that, “In Russia in particular, regardless of whether you wanted to have Jewish identity or not, you had to because you were always reminded that you were a Jew.”

Part of the reason that Russian Jews excelled in math was because unlike the sciences, math doesn’t require a lab, allowing Jews to shine despite how Soviet persecution limited their resources, explained Rutgers math professor Dr. Doron Zeilberger. As evidenced by his correspondence school, “part of the reason [Gelfand] did so well was because of the persecution,” Zeilberger said.

“Luckily, [persecution] did not stop his research,” Zeilberger said of Gelfand.

Dr. Vladimir Retakh, another math professor at Rutgers, said he was 18 years old when he started attending Gelfand’s math seminars in Moscow. Gelfand always reminded his audiences of the importance of basic principles and infused his pupils with self-confidence, Retakh said.

“I started to trust my own intuition after working with him,” Retakh said.

Zeilberger said that Gelfand’s introductions to his seminars were often longer than the lectures themselves. Gelfand often quoted Jewish sources and made Jewish jokes during the seminars, Zeilberger said.

Regarding Gelfand’s versatile contributions to the field of math, Zeilberger framed them is philosophical terms. In Gelfand’s case, Zeilberger said, the whole “is much larger than the sum of the parts.”