No label defined (Q4489581)

The topic of hypersurfaces with vanishing unimodular affine mean curvature was first treated in the article [\textit{S. S. Chern}, Proc. Japan-United States Sem., Tokyo, 1977, 17-30 (1979; Zbl 0439.53008)]. They were called ``affine minimal'' for obvious comparison with the Euclidean case. Moreover, this also led that author to compare with the corresponding Bernstein problem and formulate the following conjecture: ``A Euclidean complete, affine minimal, locally strongly convex surface in \(\mathbb{R}^3\) must be an elliptic parabaloid''. Of course, this statement has a natural extension to higher dimensions. Later on, the problem was treated by Calabi who showed, first, that a more suitable name for such hypersurfaces would be that of ``affine maximal'', due to the fact that if a hypersurface \(M\) is a critical point of the area functional \(A\), the second variation of \(A\) at \(M\) is non-positive, that is, the affine area \(A(M)\) reaches a maximum under smooth interior perturbations. Then, he verified the conjecture under the hypothesis that the affine metric of \(M\) be complete [\textit{E. Calabi}, Am. J. Math. 104, 91-126 (1982; Zbl 0501.53037)]. In this note, the authors solve Chern's conjecture for dimensions \(n=2,3\). More precisely, they prove the following: Theorem. Let \(x_{n+1}=f(x_1,\dots,x_n)\) be a strictly convex function defined for all \((x_1,\dots, x_n)\in \mathbb{R}^n\). Suppose that \(M=\{(x_1, \dots,x_n, f(x_1, \dots,x_n))\}\) is an affine maximal hypersurface, then in the case \(n=2\) or \(n=3\), \(M\) must be an elliptic parabaloid.