Berezin (25 April 1931 – 14 July 1980) was without a doubt the first person to really work with supermathematics, that is mathematics with commuting and anticommuting variables. His worked paved the way for mathematicians and theoretical physicists.

Berezin also made many important contributions to quantisation, he is best known for the notion of integration with respect to Grassmann variables and the generalisation of the determinant to a “super-determinant” known as the Berezinian.

Alexander Karabegov, Yuri Neretin and Theodore Voronov [1] have written a survey of Berezin’s work which has appeared on the arXiv.

Their survey concentrates on Berezin’s contributions to representation theory, the general concept of quantization, and supermathematics.

References

[1] Alexander Karabegov, Yuri Neretin, Theodore Voronov. Felix Alexandrovich Berezin and his work. arXiv:1202.3930v1 [math.HO].