Includes bibliographical references.

On the imbedding of normed rings into the ring of operators in Hilbert space / Israel M. Gelfand and Mark A. Neumark -- Notes on the Gelfand-Neumark theorem / Richard V. Kadison -- C*-algebras and quantization / Irving E. Segal -- Quantization and C*-algebras / Marc A. Rieffel -- Some quantizations and reflections inspired by the Gelfand-Naimark theorem / Edward G. Effros -- The role of C*-algebras in infinite dimensional numerical linear algebra / William B. Arveson -- Projections in C*-algebras / Bruce Blackadar -- C*-algebras and Mackey's theory of group representations / Jonathan Rosenberg -- Transformation group C*-algebras : a selective survey / Judith Packer -- Algebraic topology and C*-algebras / Claude Schochet -- Twenty-five years in the theory of type III von Neumann algebras / Masamichi Takesaki -- Classifying space for proper actions and K-theory of group C*-algebras / Paul Baum, Alain Connes, and Nigel Higson -- Odd index theorems and operator algebras / Ronald G. Douglas -- Index theory without symbols / Henri Moscovici and Fangbing Wu -- A survey of exponential rank / N. Christopher Phillips -- Appendix : On the imbedding of normed rings into the ring of operators in Hilbert space / I. Gelfand and M. Neumark .