Blaschke's problem for timelike surfaces (Q2655729)

The author investigates the following question (Blaschke's problem) for time-like surfaces: when do two envelopes of a sphere congruence (or rather ``spherical congruence'') induce the same conformal structure? In the process of answering this question, the author develops a description of Lorentz-Möbius geometry modelled on \(\mathbb R^5_2\) as the space of homogeneous coordinates of \(\mathbb RP^4\) and the projectivized light cone as the conformal compactification of \(3\)-dimensional Minkowski space. In particular, notions of envelope, Ribaucour sphere congruence and central sphere congruence are discussed in the signature setting. Though the algebraic conditions on the shape operators of two surfaces in the investigated geometric configuration seem less restrictive than in the positive definite case at first (n.b., the shape operators are not necessarily diagonalizable), the author arrives at a similar classification as in the classical case: the surfaces envelope a common tangent plane congruence in a quadric of constant curvature (Prop. 4), they form a Darboux pair of isothermic surfaces (Thm. 2) or a dual pair of conformally minimal surfaces (Thm. 3). The analysis is complemented by a number of explicit and instructive examples illustrating the similarities and differences between the positive definite and the time-like case.