Eugenio Calabi

Calabi has made a number of fundamental contributions to the field of differential geometry. Other contributions, not discussed here, include the construction of a holomorphic version of the long line with Maxwell Rosenlicht, a study of the moduli space of space forms, a characterization of when a metric can be found so that a given differential form is harmonic, and various works on affine geometry. In the comments on his collected works in 2021, Calabi cited his article Improper affine hyperspheres of convex type and a generalization of a theorem by K. Jörgens as that which he is "most proud of".

In 1982, Calabi introduced a geometric flow, now known as the Calabi flow, as a proposal for finding Kähler metrics of constant scalar curvature. More broadly, Calabi introduced the notion of an extremal Kähler metric, and established (among other results) that they provide strict global minima of the Calabi functional and that any constant scalar curvature metric is also a global minimum. Later, Calabi and Xiuxiong Chen made an extensive study of the metric introduced by Toshiki Mabuchi, and showed that the Calabi flow contracts the Mabuchi distance between any two Kähler metrics. Furthermore, they showed that the Mabuchi metric endows the space of Kähler metrics with the structure of a Alexandrov space of nonpositive curvature. The technical difficulty of their work is that geodesics in their infinite-dimensional context may have low differentiability.

In 1964, Calabi joined the mathematics faculty at the University of Pennsylvania. Following the retirement of the German-born American mathematician Hans Rademacher, he was appointed to the Thomas A. Scott Professorship of Mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1967. He won the Steele Prize from the American Mathematical Society in 1991 for his work in differential geometry. In 1994, Calabi assumed emeritus status. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. In 2021, he was awarded Commander of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic.

At the 1954 International Congress of Mathematicians, Calabi announced a theorem on how the Ricci curvature of a Kähler metric could be prescribed. He later found that his proof, via the method of continuity, was flawed, and the result became known as the Calabi conjecture. In 1957, Calabi published a paper in which the conjecture was stated as a proposition, but with an openly incomplete proof. He gave a complete proof that any solution of the problem must be uniquely defined, but was only able to reduce the problem of existence to the problem of establishing a priori estimates for certain partial differential equations. In the 1970s, Shing-Tung Yau began working on the Calabi conjecture, initially attempting to disprove it. After several years of work, he found a proof of the conjecture, and was able to establish several striking algebro-geometric consequences of its validity. As a particular case of the conjecture, Kähler metrics with zero Ricci curvature are established on a number of complex manifolds; these are now known as Calabi–Yau metrics. They have become significant in string theory research since the 1980s.

Calabi and Beno Eckmann discovered the Calabi–Eckmann manifold in 1953. It is notable as a simply-connected complex manifold which does not admit any Kähler metrics.

Renowned work of John Nash in the 1950s considered the problem of isometric embeddings. His work showed that such embeddings are very flexible and deformable. In his PhD thesis, Calabi had previously considered the special case of holomorphic isometric embeddings into complex-geometric space forms. A striking result of his shows that such embeddings are completely determined by the intrinsic geometry and the curvature of the space form in question. Moreover, he was able to study the problem of existence via his introduction of the diastatic function, which is a locally defined function built from Kähler potentials and which mimics the Riemannian distance function. Calabi proved that a holomorphic isometric embedding must preserve the diastatic function. As a consequence, he was able to obtain a criterion for local existence of holomorphic isometric embeddings.

Calabi was a Putnam Fellow as an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1946. He received his PhD in mathematics from Princeton University in 1950 after completing a doctoral dissertation, titled "Isometric complex analytic imbedding of Kahler manifolds", under the supervision of Salomon Bochner. He later obtained a professorship at the University of Minnesota.

Eugenio Calabi (born 11 May 1923) is an Italian-born American mathematician and the Thomas A. Scott Professor of Mathematics, Emeritus, at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in differential geometry, partial differential equations and their applications.