Albert Schwarz


Albert Solomonovich Schwarz is a mathematician and a theoretical physicist educated in the Soviet Union and now a professor at the University of California, Davis.

Early Life

Schwarz was born in Kazan, Soviet Union. His parents were arrested in the Stalinist purges in 1937 He has two children: a son, Michael A. Schwarz, and a daughter.

Education and Career

Schwarz studied under Vadim Yefremovich at Ivanovo Pedagogical Institute, having been denied admittance to Moscow State University on the grounds that he was the son of "enemies of the people." After defending his dissertation in 1958, he took a job at Voronezh University. In 1964 he was offered a job at Moscow Engineering Physics Institute. He immigrated to the United States in 1989.
Schwarz is one of the pioneers of Morse theory and brought up the first example of a topological quantum field theory. The Schwarz genus, one of the fundamental notions of topological complexity, is named after him. Schwarz worked on some examples in noncommutative geometry. He is the "S" in the famous AKSZ model.
In 1990, Schwarz was an invited speaker of the International Congress of Mathematicians in Kyoto. He was elected to the 2018 class of fellows of the American Mathematical Society.

Monographs