Gelfand is a surname meaning "elephant" in the Yiddish language and may refer to:

• People:
  • Alan Gelfand, the inventor of the ollie, a skateboarding move
  • Alan E. Gelfand, a statistician
  • Boris Gelfand, a chess grandmaster
  • Israel Gelfand, a mathematician,
  • Mikhail Gelfand, a molecular biologist and bioinformacisist, a grandson of Israel Gelfand
  • Vladimir Gelfand, a Soviet-Jewish writer
• Notions in mathematics (named after Israel Gelfand):
  • the Gelfand representation, in mathematics, allows a complete characterization of commutative C*-algebras as algebras of continuous complex-valued functions
  • the Gelfand–Naimark–Segal construction
  • the Gelfand–Naimark theorem
  • the Gelfand–Mazur theorem
  • a Gelfand pair, a pair (G,K) consisting of a locally compact unimodular group G and a compact subgroup K
  • a Gelfand triple, a construction designed to link the distribution (test function) and square-integrable aspects of functional analysis

See also

• Gelfond
• Helfand
• Helfant