Biography:Alexander Givental

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Short description: Russian American mathematician
Alexander Givental
A Givental 021114.jpg
BornApril 27, 1958
Moscow, Russia
NationalityRussian American
Alma materGubkin Russian State University of Oil and Gas
Known forArnold–Givental conjecture
Scientific career
FieldsMathematics
InstitutionsUniversity of California, Berkeley
ThesisSingularities of Solutions of Hamilton-Jacobi Equations in Variational Problems with Inequality Constraints (1987)
Doctoral advisorVladimir Arnold

Alexander Givental (Russian: Александр Борисович Гивенталь[1]) is a Russian-American mathematician who is currently Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. His main contributions have been in symplectic topology and singularity theory, as well as their relation to topological string theories.

Givental graduated from the famed Moscow high school #2 (Лицей «Вторая школа» [ru]), but was not able to enter a program at a top university due to antisemitism in Soviet mathematics. He completed his undergraduate and master studies at the Gubkin Russian State University of Oil and Gas, and defended his Ph.D. under the supervision of V. I. Arnold in 1987. He emigrated to the United States in 1990.

He provided the first proof of the mirror conjecture for Calabi–Yau manifolds that are complete intersections in toric ambient spaces, in particular for quintic hypersurfaces in P4.[2] As an extracurricular activity, he translates Russian poetry into English[3] and publishes books, including his own translation of a textbook (Элементарная геометрия (Киселёв) [ru]) in geometry by Andrey Kiselyov and poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva.[4][5] Givental is a father of two.

References

  1. "Гивенталь Александр Борисович". http://www.mathnet.ru/php/person.phtml?personid=21886&option_lang=rus. 
  2. Givental, Alexander (1996). "Equivariant Gromov - Witten Invariants". Int. Math. Res. Not. 1996 (13): 613–663. doi:10.1155/S1073792896000414. 
  3. Alexander Givental, Elysee Wilson-Egolf. "Verse Translations from Russian" (in en). https://math.berkeley.edu/~giventh/verse/verse_index.html. 
  4. Andrey Kiselyov. "Elementary Geometry" (in en). Sumizdat. https://sumizdat.org/. 
  5. Tsvetaeva, Marina (2013). Givental, Alexander; Wilson-Egolf, Elysee. eds. To You - in 10 Decades. Sumizdat. pp. 88. ISBN 978-0977985272. 
  • Cox, David A.; Katz, Sheldon (1999), Mirror Symmetry and Algebraic Geometry, Providence, Rhode Island: American Mathematical Society, ISBN 0-8218-1059-6 .
  • Sumizdat, publisher of English translation of Geometry
  • MAA review of Geometry

External links