A relative-geometric treatment of ruled surfaces (Q694999)

Consider a surface in \(\mathbb R^3\) with Euclidean Gauss curvature \(K\neq 0\), parametrized by an immersion \(\bar x:U \to \mathbb R^3\). A ``relative normalization'' \(\bar y:U\to \mathbb R^3\) can be fixed using the (nowhere vanishing) ``support function'' \(q:U \to \mathbb R\). Given \(q\), the equation \(\bar y=-h^{(ij)}{{\partial q}\over{\partial u^{i}}}{{\partial\bar x}\over{\partial u^{j}}}+q \bar\xi\) holds, where \(h^{(ij)}\) are the components of the inverse of the Euclidean second fundamental form and \(\bar\xi\) is the euclidean normal vector. The present paper is devoted to the investigation of ``ruled surfaces'' where the relative normalizations \(^{(\alpha)}\bar y\) are based on support functions \(^{(\alpha)}q:=|K|^{\alpha}, \alpha \in \mathbb R\). By different constraints using relative geometric invariants such as the Pick invariant and the Tchebychev vector, several types of ruled surfaces are characterized. An example are Edlinger surfaces, defined by the property that the osculating quadrics are hyperboloids of rotation and characterized by constancy of the parameter of distribution and a curvature line as striction line. In case of the affine normalization (obtained using \(\alpha=1/4\) above) some relations of the ruled surface and the affine normal image are discussed.