On surfaces with prescribed shape operator (Q5954147)

Before giving a review, the reviewer (being on the editorial board of the journal ``Results in Mathematics'') would like to state the following: Due to an editing error, the present version of this article was not the intended version, but was, instead a preliminary version. The editors regret this mistake which is not due to the author's responsibility. The correct and final version, Version 3.1, was posted to the arXiv on 20 July 2001 and was transmitted to the editors of Results in Mathematics on that date. The correct and final version is available from the arXiv at the URL \url{http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/math.DG/0107083}. While the final version contains some improvements over the printed preliminary version in the exposition, most of the results are the same. The most important difference is that the final version contains references to relevant work of E. V. Ferapontov of which the author was unaware during the preparation of the preliminary version, which finally appeared in print. The following review concerns the final version at arXiv, and partially uses the author's summary. This paper is an excellent exposition on an important problem in Euclidean surface theory. According to the fundamental theorem of Bonnet, the first two fundamental forms define a fundamental system for the geometry of the surface; equivalently one can consider the first fundamental form and the shape operator. In Bryant's paper, the problem of immersing a simply connected surface with a prescribed shape operator is discussed, that means only one of the fundamental tensors is given. From classical and more recent work, it is known that, aside from some special degenerate cases, such as when the shape operator can be realized by a surface with one family of principal curves being geodesic, the space of such realizations is a convex set in an affine space of dimension at most 3. The cases where this maximum dimension of realizability is achieved have been classified and it is known that there are two such families of shape operators, one depending essentially on three arbitrary functions of one variable (called Type I in this article) and another depending essentially on two arbitrary functions of one variable (called Type II in this article). Here, these classification results are rederived, with an emphasis on explicit computability of the space of solutions. It is shown that, for operators of type I and II, resp., their realizations by immersions can be computed by quadrature. Moreover, explicit normal forms for each can be computed by quadrature together with, in the case of Type I, by solving a single linear second order ODE in one variable. (Even this last step can be avoided in most Type I cases.) The space of realizations is discussed in each case, along with some of their remarkable geometric properties. Several explicit examples are constructed (mostly already in the literature) and used to illustrate various features of the problem. The current interest of this topic can be seen from the fact that several other papers on the same topic appeared since 1999, namely two of E. V. Ferapontov, cited by the author, another one by \textit{K. Voss} [``On the shape operator of surfaces in space forms''), printed in the same volume 40 of this journal, 310-320 (2001; Zbl 0995.53006)] and further papers cited by Voss. All papers together completely cover all local points of view. The reviewer would like to point out that the following global conjecture has been solved only partially, so far: an ovaloid with nowhere dense umbilics is uniquely determined by its prescribed shape operator modulo motions in Euclidean space [\textit{U. Simon, L. Vrancken, C. Wang} and \textit{M. Wiehe}, Geom. Topology of Submanifolds 10, World Sci., 284-293 (2001; Zbl 0995.53039).