THE CURVATURE OF A HESSIAN METRIC (Q4809780)

In the very clearly written paper the author considers a natural Riemannian metric on a hypersurface in a real vector space, defined by the Hessian of a homogeneous polynomial and gives a contribution to the question under which conditions this metric has nonpositive curvature. Among others he shows the following results: (a) For the real quartic form \(f= xyz(x+ y+ z)\), the index cone in \(\mathbb{R}^3\) is nonempty, and the surface \(M\) inside the index cone has positive curvature everywhere. (b) For the real cubic form \(f= (x^2{}_0+ x^2{}_1- x^2{}_2- x^2{}_3) x_3\), the index cone in \(\mathbb{R}^4\) is nonempty, and the 3-manifold \(M\) inside the index cone has positive sectional curvature on some 2-plane at every point. The problem of finding all forms \(f\) on \(\mathbb{R}^3\) such that the surface \(M\) has constant curvature also has a close relation to classical invariant theory, in particular to the Clebsch covariant. The author proves that any ternary form \(f\) of degree at most 4 such that the surface \(M\) has constant curvature is in the closure of the set of forms which can be written as \(f= \alpha(x,y)+ \beta(z)\) in some linear coordinate system and generalizes in this way a well-known result of P. M. H. Wilson. The paper is completed by comprehensive references.