21 Facts About Eugenio Calabi

Eugenio Calabi was an Italian-born American mathematician and the Thomas A Scott Professor of Mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in differential geometry, partial differential equations and their applications.

Eugenio Calabi's studies were interrupted when he was drafted in the US military in 1943 and served during World War II.

Eugenio Calabi received a master's degree in mathematics from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1947 and his PhD in mathematics from Princeton University in 1950.

In 1964, Eugenio Calabi joined the mathematics faculty at the University of Pennsylvania.

In 1994, Eugenio Calabi assumed emeritus status, and in 2014 the university awarded him an honorary doctorate of science.

In 1982, Eugenio Calabi was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Eugenio Calabi won the Leroy P Steele Prize from the American Mathematical Society in 1991, where his "fundamental work on global differential geometry, especially complex differential geometry" was cited as having "profoundly changed the landscape of the field".

Eugenio Calabi married Giuliana Segre in 1952, with whom he had a son and a daughter.

Eugenio Calabi made a number of contributions to the field of differential geometry.

At the 1954 International Congress of Mathematicians, Eugenio Calabi announced a theorem on how the Ricci curvature of a Kahler metric could be prescribed.

Eugenio Calabi later found that his proof, via the method of continuity, was flawed, and the result became known as the Calabi conjecture.

In 1957, Eugenio Calabi published a paper in which the conjecture was stated as a proposition, but with an openly incomplete proof.

Eugenio Calabi 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 1982, Eugenio Calabi introduced a geometric flow, now known as the Eugenio Calabi flow, as a proposal for finding Kahler metrics of constant scalar curvature.

Eugenio Calabi made use of a generalized notion of differential inequalities, predating the later viscosity solutions introduced by Michael Crandall and Pierre-Louis Lions.

In parallel to the classical Bernstein problem for minimal surfaces, Eugenio Calabi considered the analogous problem for maximal surfaces, settling the question in low dimensions.

Eugenio Calabi's work showed that such embeddings are very flexible and deformable.

Eugenio Calabi proved that a holomorphic isometric embedding must preserve the diastatic function.

Later, Eugenio Calabi studied the two-dimensional minimal surfaces in round spheres.

Eugenio Calabi proved that the area of topologically spherical minimal surfaces can only take on a discrete set of values, and that the surfaces themselves are classified by rational curves in a certain hermitian symmetric space.

Eugenio Calabi was the author of fewer than fifty research articles.