From Superalgebra to Superphysics

I graduated from the Physical Department of Moscow State University obtaining the diploma with honors in 1968. In the course of five and a half years of study there, I learned how to take the traces of the product of gamma matrices, learned something about Clebsch-Gordon, coefficients, and was fascinated by the beauty of the Noether theorem. I completeted my senior project under Yu.M. Shirokov, who worked at the Mathematics Institute of the Academy of Sciences. However, the Graduate School of this Institute turned me down, and the advisor of my senior project ‘sold me’ to the Theory Department of the Lebedev Physics Institute (FIAN). Thus, it was at the right time, in the spring of 1968, that I found myself in the right place: working with Yuri Abramovich Golfand.

His moderate height, rapid gait and a charming well-wishing smile were to level down the differences between our ages and positions. He showed me several commutation and anticommutation relationsbetween the operators of...