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.

Alexander Givental
BornApril 27, 1958
Moscow, Soviet Union
NationalityRussian American
Alma materGubkin Russian State University of Oil and Gas
Known forArnold–Givental conjecture
Scientific career
FieldsMathematics
InstitutionsUniversity of California, Berkeley
Thesis Singularities of Solutions of Hamilton-Jacobi Equations in Variational Problems with Inequality Constraints  (1987)
Doctoral advisorVladimir Arnold

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

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  1. ^ "Гивенталь Александр Борисович". Retrieved 2011-08-05.
  2. ^ Givental, Alexander (1996). "Equivariant Gromov - Witten Invariants". Int. Math. Res. Not. 1996 (13): 613–663. arXiv:alg-geom/9603021. doi:10.1155/S1073792896000414. S2CID 554844.
  3. ^ Alexander Givental, Elysee Wilson-Egolf. "Verse Translations from Russian". Retrieved 2020-09-09.
  4. ^ Andrey Kiselyov. "Elementary Geometry". Sumizdat. Retrieved 2020-09-09.
  5. ^ Tsvetaeva, Marina (2013). Givental, Alexander; Wilson-Egolf, Elysee (eds.). To You - in 10 Decades. Sumizdat. p. 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
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