Singularities of flat extensions from generic surfaces with boundaries (Q973200)

The paper deals with the flat extension problem on existence, uniqueness and singularities of extensions of a surface \(S\) in \(\mathbb{R}^3\) across its boundary \(\gamma\) by flat surfaces. As main result the author shows that generically a \(C^\infty\)-surface \((S,\gamma)\) has a unique flat \(C^1\) flat extension \(\widetilde S\) across \(\gamma\) near \(p\in\gamma\) provided the tangent plane \(T_pS\) does not coincide with the osculating plane of \(\gamma\) at \(p\). One sees immediately that the indicated extension problem leads to the study of the singularities of the envelope of the tangent planes \(T_pS\) for all points \(p\in\gamma\), the so-called boundary-envelope of \((S,\gamma)\). The applied efforts in the paper give an insight on elementary differential geometry from singularity theory.