Moving planes, Jacobi curves and the dynamical approach to Finsler geometry (Q1695717)

The authors provide a dynamical approach to Finsler geometry, giving rise to a unified treatment of the approaches of Grifone, Foulon and Adhout, and can be viewed as a Cartan-Klein geometrization of them. This constitutes one of the aims of this work. The other aim is to survey some curvature results that fit well with this language. The authors express invariants of Finsler manifolds in a geometrical way using the notion of moving planes and their associated Jacobi curves, which are curves in a fixed homogeneous Grassmannian manifold. They give a dynamical characterization of the sign of flag curvature in terms of the Jacobi curves and describe how the Jacobi curve furnishes a formula relating the flag curvature of a metric with that of its deformation by a closed 1-form. Furthermore, they use this language to review some applications.