Eugenio Calabi

Eugenio Calabi, one of the giants of mathematics for over half a century, died peacefully in September, several months past his hundredth birthday, at his home near Philadelphia, surrounded by his wife Giuliana and their children and grandchildren.

Gene, as we all knew him with great affection, has had a permanent and deep influence on mathematics, particularly on differential, affine and complex geometry (especially the study of Kähler manifolds and spaces of Kähler metrics ... leading to the Calabi-Yau manifolds of super-string theory), almost-complex manifolds, symplectic geometry, minimal immersions, geometry of geodesics ... and more.

In the world of geometry during the past century, Shiing-Shen Chern, Eugenio Calabi, Shing-Tung Yau and Simon Donaldson have towered over the field, while in our local world at Penn, Gene was the gentle leader of and inspiring guide to the Geometry-Topology group for the many decades he was with us.