Abstract: Abstract: To start this year's NCG seminar series, I shall give a quick survey of one of the jewel's of functional analysis, namely Gelfand's theory of commutative Banach algebras. This will naturally lead to Gelfand-Naimark's characterization of commutative C*-algebras and the notion of noncommutative space. I shall give several key examples and applications illustrating the power of Gelfand's old theory going back to the years 1939-1943!