Thierry Aubin

Who was Thierry Aubin?

Thierry Aubin 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 Shing-Tung 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 provides the largest class of known examples of compact Einstein manifolds.

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