  Building upon Dyson's fundamental 1962 article known in random-matrix theory
as 'the threefold way', we classify disordered fermion systems with quadratic
Hamiltonians by their unitary and antiunitary symmetries. Important examples
are afforded by noninteracting quasiparticles in disordered metals and
superconductors, and by relativistic fermions in random gauge field
backgrounds.
  The primary data of the classification are a Nambu space of fermionic field
operators which carry a representation of some symmetry group. Our approach is
to eliminate all of the unitary symmetries from the picture by transferring to
an irreducible block of equivariant homomorphisms. After reduction, the block
data specifying a linear space of symmetry-compatible Hamiltonians consist of a
basic vector space V, a space of endomorphisms in End(V+V*), a bilinear form on
V+V* which is either symmetric or alternating, and one or two antiunitary
symmetries that may mix V with V*. Every such set of block data is shown to
determine an irreducible classical compact symmetric space. Conversely, every
irreducible classical compact symmetric space occurs in this way.
  This proves the correspondence between symmetry classes and symmetric spaces
conjectured some time ago.
