Home Page of Misha Kapovich

I was born and grew up in Khabarovsk (see the map), in the Far East of Russia. Khabarovsk is within 20 miles from the chinese border
and about 1 hour flight from Japan, which is something I did not really appreciate until 1989. In 1980 I moved to Novosibirsk (see the map),
where I got my undergraduate degree at the Novosibirsk State University in 1985 and my PhD at the Institute of Mathematics in 1988. As an
undergraduate and graduate student I had two advisors: Samuel Krushkal and Nikolai Gusevskii.
Here is my mathematical genealogy tree.

In 1988 I went back to Khabarovsk where for 3 years I was working at the Institute for Applied Mathematics.
Doing mathematics there was a bit of a challenge since the nearest real mathematical library was within 2 hours (in Tokyo: One hour by plane plus one hour by train).
However having there Boris Botvinnik, Misha Borovoi and Petya Makienko surely helped.

I left Russia for good in Fall of 1991. I spent 1991-1992 at MSRI and in University of Maryland (College Park) visiting Bill Goldman.

From Summer of 1992 and until Summer of 2003 I was working at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City as an associate professor
and (since 1997) a professor. In 2003 I moved to UCDavis where I was reunited with my wife (who was in Atlanta before that);
I am now a professor of mathematics here. In 2007, our department was ranked 4-th in the country in Faculty Scholarly Productivity.
Hopefully, this means that we are producing something useful.

My research area could be roughly described as geometric geometry (to distinguish it from, say, algebraic geometry), or Gromov-style geometry.
I am on the editorial board of the Journal Groups, Geometry and Dynamics. In August of 2006 I gave a talk in the geometry section of ICM-2006 in Madrid.

I am currently supported by the NSF grants: DMS-05-54349 (RFG with Prakash Belkale, Tom Haines, Shrawan Kumar and John Millson) and DMS-04-05180.

I am (an) upbeat, at least according to the Pew Research Center classification.

My family:

My wife, Jennifer Schultens, is a professor in the mathematics department at UCDavis. Click here
to find out how one day she found herself on the frontpage of the New York Times.

My brothers:

The rest of the family: Schultens.net

Some of my collaborators:

Mladen Bestvina
Bill Goldman
Tom Haines
Bruce Kleiner
Shrawan Kumar
Al Marden
John Millson, we have about 15 joint papers (the number will certainly increase in the future).
Leonid Potyagailo
Ernest Vinberg

My graduate students:

Shinpei Baba
Gabriel Amos
Ezra Gouvea
Yvonne Lai Next year will be a postdoc at University of Michigan
Jaejeong Lee Next year will be a postdoc at Yale University

My postdocs:

Moon Duchin Next year will be a postdoc at University of Michigan
Lucas Sabalka

My cousin:

Katia Kapovich, is a bilingual poet (she writes in Russian and English), lives in Cambridge, MA.

She and her husband, poet Philip Nikolaev, are publishing Fuclrum, an annual of poetry and aesthetics.