The physical world is built of bricks and mortar, but there is a twist: in physics, both bricks and mortar are made of elementary particles. The elementary particles that play the roles of bricks are called fermions and the ones that play the role of mortar are called bosons. Electrons for example are fermions, and photons, the particles of light, are bosons. Where does this unification (one aspect of reality, particles, playing two roles, brick and mortar) come from?

In 1928, P. A. M. Dirac discovered that fermions are in a very precise sense the square-root of bosons, much like 2 is the square root of 4, for a very simple (!?) reason: the geometry of space-time. Almost a hundred years later, the paper ``Squaring the fermion..." shows that there is also a square-root relationship between fermions and bosons rooted in a simpler structure: the geometry of space alone, without reference to time. Thanks to this realization, the authors are able to build models of condensed matter systems hosting localized (zero-energy) Majorana bosons and investigate the properties of these exotic bosonic excitations in detail.

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