Alexander Givental

Alexander Givental (Russian: Александр Борисович Гивенталь^[1]) 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.

Alexander Givental
Born	April 27, 1958 Moscow, Soviet Union
Nationality	Russian American
Alma mater	Gubkin Russian State University of Oil and Gas
Known for	Arnold–Givental conjecture
Scientific career
Fields	Mathematics
Institutions	University of California, Berkeley
Thesis	Singularities of Solutions of Hamilton-Jacobi Equations in Variational Problems with Inequality Constraints  (1987)
Doctoral advisor	Vladimir Arnold

Givental graduated from the famed Moscow high school #2 (Лицей «Вторая школа» [ru]), one of the math teachers was Valery Senderov, 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.^[2] As an extracurricular activity, he translates Russian poetry into English^[3] and publishes books, including his own translation of a textbook (Элементарная геометрия (Киселёв) [ru]) in geometry by Andrey Kiselyov and poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva.^[4][5] Givental is a father of two.