FELIX BEREZIN

This book is about Felix Berezin, an outstanding Soviet mathematician who in the 1960s and 70s was the driving force behind the emergence of the branch of mathematics now known as supermathematics.

PART The integral over the anticoommuting Grassmann variables he introduced in the 1960s laid the ONE foundation for the path integral formulation of with fermions, the heart of modern supersymmetric field theories and superstrings. The Berezin integral is named for him, as is the closely related construction of the which may be regarded as the superanalog of the determinant.

PART In a masterfully written memoir Berezin’s widow, Elena Karpel, narrates a remarkable story of TWO Berezin’s life and his struggle for survival in the totalitarian Soviet regime. This story is supple-

mented by recollections of Berezin’s close friends and colleagues. Berezin’s acccomplishments of Supermathematics Life and death of the mastermind in mathematics, his novel ideas and breakthrough works, are reviewed in two articles written by Andrei Losev and Robert Minlos.

ABOUT M. Shifman is the Ida Cohen Fine Professor of Physics at the University of Minnesota. After receiv- THE EDITOR ing his PhD (1976) from the Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics in he went through all stages of the academic career there. In 1990 he moved to the USA to assume his present position as a member of the William I. Fine Theoretical Physics Institute at the University of Minnesota. In 1997 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He has had the honor of receiving the 1999 Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics and the 2006 Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize for outstanding contributions to physics. He is the author of several books, over 280 scientific publications, and a number of popular articles and articles on the history of high-energy physics. edited by M. Shifman