Historical Remarks
One of Gelfand's original applications (and one which historically motivated much of the study of Banach algebras) was to give a much shorter and more conceptual proof of a celebrated lemma of Norbert Wiener (see the citation below), characterizing the elements of the group algebras L1(R) and whose translates span dense subspaces in the respective algebras.
Read more about this topic: Gelfand Representation
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