Michael Kapovich (also Misha Kapovich, born Mikhail Erikovich Kapovich, ; March 13, 1963 – June 16, 2026In Memoriam: Michael Kapovich. March 13, 1963 - June 16, 2026, Department of Mathematics, University of California, Davis. Accessed July 29, 2026) 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" (Flat conformal structures on 3-manifolds, Russian lang. thesis). 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, , 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.
Selected publications Articles On monodromy of complex projective structures. Invent. Math. 119 (1995), no. 1, 243–265. with B. Leeb: On asymptotic cones and quasi-isometric classes of fundamental groups of 3-manifolds. Geom. Funct. Anal. 5 (1995), no. 3, 582–603. with J. J. Millson: On the moduli space of polygons in the Euclidean plane. J. Differential Geom. 42 (1995), no. 1, 133–164. with J. J. Millson: The symplectic geometry of polygons in Euclidean space. J. Differential Geom. 44 (1996), no. 3, 479–513. with B. Leeb: Quasi-isometries preserve the geometric decomposition of Haken manifolds. Invent. Math. 128 (1997), no. 2, 393–416. with J. J. Millson: On representation varieties of Artin groups, projective arrangements and the fundamental groups of smooth complex algebraic varieties. Inst. Hautes Études Sci. Publ. Math. 88 (1998), 5–95 (1999). with D. Gallo, A. Marden: The monodromy groups of Schwarzian equations on closed Riemann surfaces. Ann. of Math. (2) 151 (2000), no. 2, 625–704. with B. Kleiner: Hyperbolic groups with low-dimensional boundary. Ann. Sci. Ecole Norm. Sup. (4) 33 (2000), no. 5, 647–669. with M. Bestvina, B. Kleiner: Van Kampen's embedding obstruction for discrete groups. Invent. Math. 150 (2002), no. 2, 219–235. Homological dimension and critical exponent of Kleinian groups. Geom. Funct. Anal. 18 (2009), no. 6, 2017–2054. Dirichlet fundamental domains and topology of projective varieties. Invent. Math. 194 (2013), no. 3, 631–672 with J. Kollár: Fundamental groups of links of isolated singularities. J. Amer. Math. Soc. 27 (2014), no. 4, 929–952. with B. Leeb, J. Porti: Anosov subgroups: Dynamical and geometric characterizations. Eur. J. Math. 3 (2017), 808–898.
Books Reprint of the 2001 edition. Modern Birkhäuser Classics. Birkhäuser Boston, Inc., Boston, MA, 2009. with Bernhard Leeb and John Millson: with Cornelia Druţu: with Pranab Sardar:
References
External links
lectures at Geometry, Groups and Dynamics (GGD) – 2017, International Centre for Theoretical Sciences, Tata Institute