Не делить с подонками хлеба,

Перед властью не падать ниц,

И не верить ни в чистое небо,

Ни в улыбки сиятельных лиц.
..................................................

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 Novosiborsk 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 1991-1992 at MSRI 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. I am on the editorial board of the journal "Groups, Geometry and Dynamics". In August of 2006 I gave an invited talk in the geometry section of  ICM-2006 in Madrid.


I am (an) upbeat, at least according to the Pew Research Center classification.

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. 

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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,  is a professor in the mathematics department of  Hunter College (CUNY).

Vitali Kapovitch, is a professor in the mathematics department at the University of Toronto.

As you can see, doing mathematics is our family business.

The rest of the family: Schultens.net

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Some of my collaborators:

Arkady Berenstein
Mladen Bestvina
Subhadip Dey
Bill Goldman
Koji Fujiwara
Tom Haines
Sungwoon Kim
Bruce Kleiner
Janos Kollar
Alex Kontorovich
Shrawan Kumar
Jaejeong Lee
Bernhard Leeb
Beibei Liu
Al Marden
John Millson, we have over 20 joint papers
Joan Porti
Leonid Potyagailo
Ernest Vinberg

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My former and current graduate students:

Shinpei Baba  An associate professor at Osaka University
Gabriel Amos
James Forehand, a professor at the American River College
Ezra Gouvea
Sonjong Hwang 
Yvonne Lai    Milton E Mohr associate professor at University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Jaejeong Lee    А researcher at Seoul National University (Korea)
Dustin Mayeda
Beibei Liu       Аn assistant professor at the Ohio State University
Subhadip Dey A postdoc at Yale University

 
My (current and former) postdocs:

Moon Duchin   A professor at Tufts University. Also, check out her Wikipedia page!

Didac Martinez Granado, a postdoc at the University of Luxembourg/NUS Singapore.

Lucas Sabalka A researcher at ESA Environmental Justice Section.

Pranab Sardar  An associate professor at Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Mohali.