When I was eleven, I decided that I didn't want to go to school every day. I asked my parents to give me permission to skip one day of school. They said, yes, if you do something reasonable. So I suggested to them that I'd learn chess. And for half a year I learned playing chess. And then they said it was not sufficient, choose something else. So I chose mathematics. This is how I started mathematics.

Those meetings opened the world of mathematics to me. The fundamental lesson Gelfand imparted was the feeling that mathematics constitutes a unity, that even if in the apparent diversity of subjects falling within the discipline, such divisions should not be taken too seriously.

The following problem is considered. An impulse is propagated along the circumference of a circle. The velocity of the propagation of the impulse depends on the position of the given point on the circumference which is given by the time $\tau$ elapsed since the last previous passage of the impulse through the given point. The object is to prove that if we are given $\tau$ on the circumference in any way, and after that induce on the circumference one or several impulses, than their velocity will tend to some constant which is independent of the initial state. If the number of impulses is greater than one, then their limiting velocity will be the same for all impulses and the distances between the impulses will become equal. This problem has been considered in an earlier work [I M Gelfand and M L Cetlin (1960)]. The proof is accomplished under the assumption that the velocity function $\upsilon(\tau)$ is strictly monotone and differentiable.

Despite the hermetically closed borders of the communist state, for young Soviet students such interactions offered access to cutting edge developments in the various realms of mathematics on an international scale.

... proved to be a prodigy. Let me illustrate this by an early example. When he was still a kid, I am not sure exactly what age but maybe about 18 or 19, he had already become internationally famous for something which nowadays is called Kazhdan Property (T). What is amazing about this Kazhdan Property (T) is that so many applications in so many different areas have been found, some of then by Kazhdan himself, but also by so many other people, and the most interesting thing is that they've even found application of the Property (T) in down-to-earth applied mathematics, or more precisely in computer science. There are nowadays some network communications which are built by the so called expander graphs and expander graphs were constructed for the first time using Kazhdan Property (T).

Harvard was a remarkably friendly and stimulating place. The Department integrated many different mathematical minds and offered a unique platform for interactions and collaborations between the faculty and the graduate student community. And more broadly, the world of Boston academia provided an auspicious environment for my work. I collaborated with various colleagues at Harvard and was exceptionally lucky to become a friend and collaborator of Romanian-born George Lusztig. And beyond the academic satisfactions of my tenure at Harvard, my family quickly made Boston our "home". Relationships were built and long-lasting friendships forged.

... the fellowship is not a reward for past accomplishment, but rather an investment in a person's originality, insight, and potential but the award is based on a track record of significant accomplishments.

David Kazhdan is a mathematician known for his contributions to geometry, number theory, and mathematical physics. Kazhdan is concerned with the different ways symmetry occurs in nature and mathematics and his research focuses on algebraic aspects of analysis and geometric, representation theory.  His ideas have influenced work in the areas of automorphic representations, differential geometry, differential equations, representations of finite groups, and number theory.  His most celebrated result, the Kazhdan-Lusztig conjecture, showed that most of the fundamental invariants of representation theory are really invariants of intersection cohomology. He is co-editor of 'Quantum Fields and Strings: A Course for Mathematicians' (1999), and serves on the editorial board of the 'Journal of the American Mathematical Society'.

He also discovered Kazhdan's property and jointly, with Margulis, proved Selberg's conjecture, fundamental in the theory of discrete groups. Kazhdan made important contributions to the theory of infinite-dimensional Lie algebras, quantum groups, representation theory of Hecke algebras, Langlands program, differential geometry, and model theory.

I had just started my postdoctoral work in vascular biology at Harvard Medical School. I was immersed in a world of cutting-edge science, of empiricism. But on the weekends I left that world behind to engage with the preeminent rabbi and legendary philosophical scholar who promoted building bridges between traditional Orthodox Judaism and the modern world. And it was in Soloveitchik's class that I met David.

By the time we met, he had vast knowledge of both Hebrew and Aramaic Jewish texts. Soloveitchik enjoyed conversing with him and was amazed by his brilliance and his dedication to Jewish studies.

On a Sunday morning in 1977, following Soloveitchik's Talmud class, David approached me. "Do you want to learn together?" he asked, in a pronounced Russian accent. I said yes, and we set up a daily schedule and started studying "in friendship", as partners.

Over the following decades, we covered various topics and texts. Bible, tractates of Talmud, the writings of Maimonides and of Nachmanides, other philosophical texts. Initially, these daily sessions took place in the early mornings at the Tolner synagogue in Brookline ...

Kazhdan's lectures in Part 1 treat the axiomatic approach to quantum field theory. This is an attempt to prove general theorems about quantum fields that can be used in navigating the maze of specific examples.

... climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa. The mountain juts 20,000 feet into the air is mountain climber's dream, and Kazhdan - his age notwithstanding - chose to climb Kilimanjaro to the summit on his own. After that, climbing Machu Picchu in Peru the following year was a breeze.

... for his work in design of representation theory and its uses in algebra, algebraic geometry and number theory.

... for their huge influence on and profound contributions to representation theory, as well as many other areas of mathematics.

The research was checked and confirmed by Dr David Kazhdan, chairman of the Harvard mathematics department and by Harold Gans, a senior code specialist with the U.S. Army. Both concluded that the Torah Code actually exists and that it could not have occurred by chance or by human design.

Some presentations have made much of a letter of approbation signed by four distinguished mathematicians (Joseph Bernstein, then of Harvard, now of Tel Aviv University; Hillel Furstenberg of Hebrew University; David Kazhdan of Harvard and Ilya Piatetski-Shapiro of Tel Aviv University and Yale). Three of these are Orthodox and I'd be hard pressed to find a more distinguished group of Orthodox mathematicians.

But their letter is very carefully worded to state nothing more than that they find the Famous Rabbis experiment interesting and worthy of further study. Professor Rips himself [who undertook the Bible Code research] told me that he didn't think any of them were convinced of its validity and that is certainly true of the two of them I know and consulted. Indeed, Kazhdan's response to the presentation of his position on the above web site (Kazhdan was the chairman of the Harvard Mathematics Department at the time the page was prepared) was that "I am sorry to see my position in such a distorted form."