Two approaches to supermanifolds

Abstract

The problem of supplying an analogue of a manifold whose sheaf of functions contains anticommuting elements has been approached in two ways. Either one extends the sheaf of functions formally, as in the category of graded manifolds [3], [8], or one mimicks the usual definition of a manifold, having replaced Euclidean space with a suitable product of the odd and even parts of an exterior algebra as in the category of supermanifolds [6]. This paper establishes the equivalence of the category of supermanifolds with the category of graded manifolds.