Rigidity of proper holomorphic mappings between nonequidimensional bounded symmetric domains

We prove that any proper holomorphic mapping from to is necessarily a totally geodesic isometric embedding with respect to their Bergman metrics and therefore is the standard linear embedding up to their automorphisms. The proof of the main result in this paper will be achieved by a differential-geometric study of a special class of complex geodesic curves on the bounded symmetric domains with respect to their Bergman metrics. Received: 31 October 2000; in final form: 2 July 2001/ Published online: 4 April 2002