Includes bibliographical references.

On the imbedding of normed rings into the ring of operators in Hilbert space ; Notes on the GelfandNeumark theorem ; ^\ast lgebras and quantization ; Quantization and ^\ast lgebras ; Some quantizations and reflections inspired by the GelfandNaimark theorem ; The role of ^\ast lgebras in infinitedimensional numerical linear algebra ; Projections in ^\ast lgebras ; ^\ast lgebras and Mackey's theory of group representations ; Transformation group ^\ast lgebras: a selective survey ; Algebraic topology and ^\ast lgebras ; Twentyfive years in the theory of type rm III von Neumann algebras ; Classifying space for proper actions and heory of group ^\ast lgebras ; Odd index theorems and operator algebras ; Index theory without symbols ; A survey of exponential rank ; On the imbedding of normed rings into the ring of operators in Hilbert space I Gelfand and M Neumark ; Richard V Kadison ; Irving Segal ; Marc A Rieffel ; Edward G Effros ; William Arveson ; Bruce Blackadar ; Jonathan Rosenberg ; Judith Packer ; Claude Schochet ; Masamichi Takesaki ; Paul Baum Alain Connes and Nigel Higson ; R G Douglas ; Henri Moscovici and Fangbing Wu ; N Christopher Phillips ; I Gelfand and M Neumark