Alexander Givental

Alexander Givental is a Russian-American mathematician working in symplectic topology and singularity theory, as well as their relation to topological string theories. He graduated from Moscow Lyceum number 2 and then the Gubkin Russian State University of Oil and Gas, and he finally his Ph.D. under the supervision of V. I. Arnold in 1987. He emigrated to the USA 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. He is now Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. As an extracurricular activity, he translates Russian poetry into English and publishes books, including his own translation of a textbook in geometry by Andrey Kiselyov and poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva. Givental is a father of two.