Alexander Givental

Alexander Givental () is a Russian American mathematician working in the area of symplectic topology, singularity theory and their relations to topological string theories. He graduated Moscow Lyceum number 2 (), then Gubkin Russian State University of Oil and Gas, learned his Ph.D. under the supervision of V. I. Arnold, in 1987, 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 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.