He went to Pedagogical Institute instead and transferred to Moscow State University when he was a third year student.

His two-page note in the journal Functional Analysis and Its Applications was one of the papers on the study of derived categories of coherent sheaves.

He collaborated with Pierre Deligne on the developing a motivic interpretation of Don Zagier's polylogarithm conjectures.

From the early 1990s onwards, Beilinson worked with Vladimir Drinfeld to rebuild the theory of vertex algebras.

After some informal circulation, this research was published in 2004 in a form of a monograph on chiral algebras.