Alexander Givental

Alexander Givental (Александр Борисович Гивенталь ) 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, 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. 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.