Thierry Aubin

Aubin was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1979. He was elected to the Académie des sciences in 2003.

In the same year, Aubin introduced an approach to the Calabi conjecture, in the field of Kähler geometry, via the calculus of variations. Later, in 1976, Aubin established the existence of Kähler–Einstein metrics on Kähler manifolds whose first Chern class is negative. Independently, Shing-Tung Yau proved the more powerful Calabi conjecture, which concerns the general problem of prescribing the Ricci curvature of a Kähler metric, via non-variational methods. As such, the existence of Kähler–Einstein metrics with negative first Chern class is often called the Aubin–Yau theorem. After learning Yau's techniques from Jerry Kazdan, Aubin found some simplifications and modifications of his work, along with Kazdan and Jean-Pierre Bourguignon.

In 1970, Aubin established that any closed smooth manifold of dimension larger than two has a Riemannian metric of negative scalar curvature. Furthermore, he proved that a Riemannian metric of nonnegative Ricci curvature can be deformed to positive Ricci curvature, provided that its Ricci curvature is strictly positive at one point.

Thierry Aubin (6 May 1942 – 21 March 2009) was a French mathematician who worked at the Centre de Mathématiques de Jussieu, and was a leading expert on Riemannian geometry and non-linear partial differential equations. His fundamental contributions to the theory of the Yamabe equation led, in conjunction with results of Trudinger and Schoen, to a proof of the Yamabe Conjecture: every compact Riemannian manifold can be conformally rescaled to produce a manifold of constant scalar curvature. Along with Yau, he also showed that Kähler manifolds with negative first Chern classes always admit Kähler–Einstein metrics, a result closely related to the Calabi conjecture. The latter result, established by Yau, provides the largest class of known examples of compact Einstein manifolds. Aubin was the first mathematician to propose the Cartan–Hadamard conjecture.