...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, "Вальс посвященноый уставу караульной службы")

...The Curtain of Iron, in its cruel grace,

Has taught us a valuable lesson to face:

With scoundrels, don't ever break bread,

To power don't bow your head,

Put no trust in fast shifting sand,

See no truth in smiles of the grand...

_________________________________

I was born and grew up in Khabarovsk, 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. When people learn that I was born in Khabarovsk, they frequently ask how did my family ended up there. Almost nobody moves to Russian Far East on their free volition. My father was sent to Khabarovsk to serve there as an officer of the Soviet Army in 1953 (he was a civil engineer). My mother moved there (with her mom and older brother) in 1941 from Kiev when escaping Nazi encirclement and sure death, to join her father in Khabarovsk (who was serving there as a military doctor).  

In 1980 I moved to Novosibirsk, 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 in Khabarovsk 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 there. In 2007, our department was ranked 4-th in the country in Faculty Scholarly Productivity.  Hopefully, this means that we are producing something useful. From 2016 through 2018 I was a KIAS (Seoul, Korea) scholar. 

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.

Here is some of my family history, as told by my cousin Katia Kapovich.  Also, info about my paternal grandfather, Isaak Kapovich-Kogan, can be found 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 of mathematics at Hunter College (CUNY).

Vitali Kapovitch, he is a professor of the mathematics at University of Toronto. (Yes, he spells his last name differently.)   

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), we have published 19 joint papers

Beibei Liu (The Ohio State University)

Al Marden (University of Minnesota)

John Millson (University of Maryland), we have published 21 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:

Gabriel Amos

Shinpei Baba  Associate professor in Osaka University

Subhadip Dey Assistant professor in TIFR (Mumbai)

Yukun Du   Postdoc at University of Georgia (Athens)

Ezra Gouvea

James Forehand Professor in the American River College

Sonjong Hwang 

Yvonne Lai     Milton E Mohr professor in University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Jaejeong Lee Researcher in Seoul National University (Korea)

Beibei Liu   Аssistant professor in the Ohio State University

Dustin Mayeda

My former postdocs:

Moon Duchin   Professor in Cornell University.

Didac Martinez Granado Postdoc in the University of Luxembourg/NUS Singapore.

Lucas Sabalka Chief scientist at ESA Environmental Justice Section (Lincoln, Nebraska).

Pranab Sardar  Associate professor in Indian Institute of Science Education and  Research, Mohali.