No label defined (Q4240417)

The author studies 2-dimensional affine spheres. The class of affine spheres is without any doubt the most studied class of hypersurfaces in affine differential geometry. An affine hypersurface is called an affine sphere if all affine normals are parallel or pass through a fixed point. The nondegenerate quadrics are the easiest examples of affine spheres. It is well known that affine spheres correspond to solutions of equations of Monge-Ampére type. In the present paper the author shows how, in a neighborhood of a point with non-vanishing Pick invariant, two-dimensional positive definite (respectively indefinite) affine spheres also correspond to solutions of soliton equations. Namely, \(\omega_{z\overline z}+ e^{-2\omega} +{1\over 4} He^\omega=0\) locally characterizes positive definite affine spheres and \(\omega_{uv}+ \varepsilon e^{-2\omega} +{1\over 4}He^\omega=0\), where \(\varepsilon= \pm 1\) and \(H\) is a constant, locally characterizes indefinite affine spheres. For the entire collection see [Zbl 0910.00044].