The discovery of supersymmetry is one of the most distinguished achievements
of theoretical physics in the second half of the twentieth century. The
fundamental significance of supersymmetry was realized almost immediately
after the pioneering papers by Gol’fand and Likhtman, Volkov and Akulov
and Wess and Zumino. Within a short space of time the supersymmetric
generalization of the standard model was found, the supersymmetric theory
of gravity constructed, and the approaches to supersymmetric string theory
developed. It has also emerged that supersymmetry is of interest in certain
quantum mechanical problems and even some classical ones.