Book 23

The aim of this book is to describe Calabi's original work on Kahler immersions of Kahler manifolds into complex space forms, to provide a detailed account of what is known today on the subject and to point out some open problems.

Calabi's pioneering work, making use of the powerful tool of the diastasis function, allowed him to obtain necessary and sufficient conditions for a neighbourhood of a point to be locally Kahler immersed into a finite or infinite-dimensional complex space form. This led to a classification of (finite-dimensional) complex space forms admitting a Kahler immersion into another, and to decades of further research on the subject.

Each chapter begins with a brief summary of the topics to be discussed and ends with a list of exercises designed to test the reader's understanding. Apart from the section on Kahler immersions of homogeneous bounded domains into the infinite complex projective space, which could be skipped without compromising the understanding of the rest of the book, the prerequisites to read this book are a basic knowledge of complex and Kahler geometry.