Projective ranks of Hermitian symmetric spaces (Q2365832)

The article is concerned with the following question. Let \(M\) be a compact Hermitian symmetric space. What are the maximal closed totally geodesic complex submanifolds biholomorphic to projective spaces? The maximal dimension of such submanifolds is called the projective rank of \(M\). The author gives an explicit description of those submanifolds for classical series of Hermitian symmetric spaces. A related question has been studied by the reviewer [J. Differ. Geom. 37, 123-160 (1993)], where a classification of ``invariantly'' geodesic submanifolds was made (cf. Prop. 4.5, loc. cit). It can be checked that the subspaces in the list of the present article are invariantly geodesic, meaning that the subspaces remain totally geodesic by any biholomorphic transformations of \(M\) (which are not metric preserving in general). In addition to discussions above the present article treats the fundamentals of the geometry of complex manifolds and of Hermitian symmetric spaces with the illustration of examples, and gives an account of the background for the Frankel conjecture, in the style accessible to ones interested in this field.