Felix Alexandrovich Berezin (Russian: Феликс Александрович Березин) (25 April 1931 – July 14, 1980) was a Soviet Russian mathematician and physicist known for his contributions to the theory of supersymmetry and supermanifolds as well as to the path integral formulation of quantum field theory.

Berezin studied at the Moscow State University, but was not allowed to do his graduate studies there on account of his Jewish origin (his mother was Jewish). For the next three years Berezin taught at Moscow high schools. He continued to study mathematical physics under direction of Israel Gelfand. After Khrushchev's liberalization, he joined the Department of Mathematics at the Moscow State University at the age of 25.

The Berezin integral over anticommuting Grassmann variables is named for him, as is the closely related construction of the Berezinian which may be regarded as the "super"-analog of the determinant.

Berezin drowned during a Summer trip in Kolyma region.

[edit] Works

• The Method of Second Quantization, Academic Press (1966).
• Introduction to Superanalysis, Springer (1987).

[edit] See also

• Berezin transform

[edit] References

• (Russian) In Memory of Felix Aleksandrovich Berezin, by Yu.I. Manin, M.A. Markov, S.P. Novikov, V.I. Ogievetsky, V.Ya. Faynberg, and E.S. Fradkin.
• Robert A. Minlos (October 2005). "Felix Alexandrovich Berezin (A Brief Scientific Biography)". Letters in Mathematical Physics 74: 5–19. 
• Feliks Aleksandrovich Berezin. Obituary (in Russian), by N.N. Bogolyubov, I.M. Gelfand, R.L. Dobrushin, A.A. Kirillov, M.G. Krein, D.A. Leites, R.A. Minlos, Ya.G. Sinai and M.A. Shubin, Uspekhi Mat. Nauk 36 (1981), 185–190.
• Felix Berezin, The Life and Death of the Mastermind of Supermathematics, edited by M. Shifman, World Scientific, Singapore, 2007, ISBN 978-981-270-532-7

[edit] External links

• Felix Berezin at the Mathematics Genealogy Project