Michael Kapovich
Michael Kapovich was a Russian-American mathematician.
Kapovich was awarded a doctorate in 1988 at the Sobolev Institute of Mathematics in Novosibirsk with thesis advisor Samuel Leibovich Krushkal and thesis "Плоские конформные структуры на 3-многообразиях". Kapovich was a professor at University of California, Davis, beginning in 2003.
His research dealt with low-dimensional geometry and topology, Kleinian groups, hyperbolic geometry, geometric group theory, geometric representation theory in Lie groups, spaces of nonpositive curvature, and configuration spaces of arrangements and mechanical linkages.
In 2006, in Madrid, he was an Invited Speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians with talk Generalized triangle inequalities and their applications.
He was married to mathematician Jennifer Schultens. He had two brothers, both of whom are mathematicians as well: Ilya Kapovich works in group theory and geometric topology at CUNY, and Vitali Kapovich researches global Riemannian geometry at the University of Toronto. His first cousin, Katia Kapovich is a prominent poet writing in Russian and English.
Kapovich died on June 16, 2026, at the age of 63.
Kapovich was awarded a doctorate in 1988 at the Sobolev Institute of Mathematics in Novosibirsk with thesis advisor Samuel Leibovich Krushkal and thesis "Плоские конформные структуры на 3-многообразиях". Kapovich was a professor at University of California, Davis, beginning in 2003.
His research dealt with low-dimensional geometry and topology, Kleinian groups, hyperbolic geometry, geometric group theory, geometric representation theory in Lie groups, spaces of nonpositive curvature, and configuration spaces of arrangements and mechanical linkages.
In 2006, in Madrid, he was an Invited Speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians with talk Generalized triangle inequalities and their applications.
He was married to mathematician Jennifer Schultens. He had two brothers, both of whom are mathematicians as well: Ilya Kapovich works in group theory and geometric topology at CUNY, and Vitali Kapovich researches global Riemannian geometry at the University of Toronto. His first cousin, Katia Kapovich is a prominent poet writing in Russian and English.
Kapovich died on June 16, 2026, at the age of 63.
