The history of supersymmetry is exceptional. In the past, virtually all major conceptual breakthroughs have occurred because physicists were trying to understand some established aspect of nature. In contrast, the discovery of supersymmetry in the early 1970s was a purely intellectual achievement, driven by the logic of theoretical development rather than by the pressure of existing data. The history of supersymmetry is unique because it was discovered practically simultaneously and independently by two groups of researchers in different parts of the world.
Supersymmetry was first proposed by Hironari Miyazawa in 1966, but his work was ignored at the time. In the early 1970s two groups of researchers rediscovered supersymmetry independent of each other. The discovery was made by these groups without any collaboration between them because of political tension between their respective countries at the time. One group in the USSR was exploring the mathematics of space-time symmetry and the other group in the west was trying to add fermions to bosonic string theory.
In the USSR, mathematicians Yuri Gol'fand and E. P. Likhtman wanted to do something exotic with the group theory of space-time symmetries. What Gol'fand and Likhtman ended up with was the group theory of supersymmetric transformations in four space-time dimensions. Using this new type of symmetry they constructed the first supersymmetric quantum field theory. Their work was ignored, both in the Soviet Union and in the West, until years later when supersymmetry was recognized as a major topic of investigation in particle physics.
In the west, a completely different approach was taken. In 1973 Julius Wess and Bruno Zumino developed a theory of supersymmetry while studying two dimensional dual models. Dual models later came to be known as string theory.
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