...Заколюченные
параллели
Преподали нам
славный урок:
Не делить с
подонками хлеба,
Перед властью не
падать ниц,
И не верить ни в
чистое небо,
Ни в улыбки сиятельных лиц....
(Александр Галич)
With scoundrels, never break your bread,
Before no power bow your head,
And put no trust in shifting sand,
Nor in the smiles of high and grand.
(Александр Галич)
With scoundrels, never break your bread,
Before no power bow your head,
And put no trust in shifting sand,
Nor in the smiles of high and grand.
..................................................
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 Novosibirsk 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 (actually, a graph).
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 as 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. All in all, I have spent 28 of my life in Siberia, which makes me an Asian-American (I think).
I left Russia for good in Fall of 1991. I spent the academic year of 1991-1992 at MSRI (Berkeley), now called SLMath, 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 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. In August of 2006 I gave an invited talk in the geometry section of ICM-2006 in Madrid.
Me on Mathoverflow.
Anonymous on math.stackexchange.
Description of some of my work since 2003.
Some of my family history, as told by my cousin Katia. Also, info about my grandfather, Isaak Kapovich-Kogan, here and here.
My family:
My wife, Jennifer Schultens, is a professor of mathematics at UCDavis. Click here to find out how one day she found herself on the front-page of the New York Times.
My brothers:
Ilia
Kapovich, he is
a professor in the mathematics department of Hunter College
(CUNY).
Vitali Kapovitch, he is a professor in the mathematics department at the University of Toronto.
Vitali Kapovitch, he is a professor in the mathematics department at the University of Toronto.
As you can see, doing
mathematics is our "family business."
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.
The rest of the family: Schultens.net
Some of my collaborators:
Mikhail Belolipetsky (IMPA, Brazil)
Arkady Berenstein (University of Oregon)
Mladen Bestvina (University of Utah)
Subhadip Dey (Tata Institute for Fundamental Research, Mumbai)
Cornelia Drutu (Oxford University)
Bill Goldman (University of Maryland)
Koji Fujiwara (Kyoto University)
Tom Haines (University of Maryland)
Sungwoon Kim (Jeju National University, Korea)
Bruce Kleiner (NYU)
Janos Kollar (Princeton University)
Alex Kontorovich (Rutgers University)
Shrawan Kumar (UNC Chapel Hill)
Jaejeong Lee (Seoul National University)
Bernhard Leeb (Munchen University)
Beibei Liu (The Ohio State University)
Al Marden (University of Minnesota)
John Millson (University of Maryland), we have 21 joint papers
Joan Porti (University Autonoma of Barcelona)
Leonid Potyagailo (Lille University)
Pranab Sardar (IISER Mohali)
Ernest Vinberg (Moscow State University), sadly, he passed away in 2020
My former graduate students:
Shinpei Baba An associate professor in Osaka University
Gabriel Amos
James Forehand, a professor in the American River College
Ezra Gouvea
Sonjong Hwang
Yvonne Lai Milton E Mohr professor in University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Jaejeong Lee А researcher in Seoul National University (Korea)
Dustin Mayeda
Beibei Liu Аn assistant professor in the Ohio State University
Subhadip Dey An assistant professor in TIFR (Mumbai)
Yukun Du A postdoc at University of Georgia (Athens)
My former postdocs:
Moon Duchin A professor in Cornell University. Also, check out her Wikipedia page!
Didac Martinez Granado A postdoc in the University of Luxembourg/NUS Singapore.
Lucas Sabalka A researcher in ESA Environmental Justice Section.
Pranab Sardar An associate professor in Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Mohali.
Khabarovsk (on the right) is the place I grew up,
Novosibirsk (in the center) is the place where I got my
undergraduate and graduate degrees.