Stable norms of non-orientable surfaces (Q933637)

For smooth compact Riemannian manifolds, with positive first Betti number, the stable norms on the first homology class are defined using an infimum process that can be achieved if the dimension of the manifold is two. For the class of orientable compact surfaces the structure of the unit ball for such stable norms were studied in [Geom. Funct. Anal. 7, No.6, 996--1010 (1997; Zbl 0903.58001)]. In this paper, the authors study the non-orientable case. Their main result states that on a closed non-orientable surface each conformal class contains a metric whose stable norm has a polyhedron as its unit ball. Such stable norm is never strictly convex if the first Betti number of the surface is greater than two.