scientific article; zbMATH DE number 193447

Publication date 5 June 1993

After the pioneering work of Brunn and Minkowski, it was mainly Blaschke to whom the theory of convex bodies owes most of its early advancement and development. His book ``Kreis und Kugel of 1916 [JFM 46.1109.01] presented many new ideas and was influential for years to come. The present volume of Blaschke's Collected Works is devoted to his contributions to convex geometry; it contains 40 articles ranging from 1912 to 1956. The topics belong to the Euclidean and affine geometry of general convex bodies as well as to Euclidean and equiaffine differential geometry of (sufficiently smooth) closed convex surfaces; some of the papers treat relations of convexity to the calculus of variations. There are, of course, several ``classics among the results; for instance, the integral-formula proof of the infinitesimal rigidity of smooth ovaloids, the proof of the affine isoperimetric inequality, the proof of the volume inequality which is now called the Blaschke-Santaló inequality, and a number of extremum properties and characterizations of ellipsoids. In reading the book, one is reminded how much the geometry of convex bodies owes to Blaschke, to mention only the nowadays very familiar use of the Blaschke selection theorem for existence proofs and his ingenious applications of symmetrization procedures to various problems, for many of which till today no other approaches have been found. For a worker in the field, this volume is not only of historical interest; several of the papers are still stimulating, and extensions of some of Blaschke's investigations are the subject of contemporary research. The collection is also useful since apparently some of Blaschke's original papers were not easily accessible. Hopefully, it will help in doing him a bit more justice, so that in namings like ``Theorem of Blaschke and Deicke or ``Blaschke-Santaló inequality his name will no longer be omitted (as the reviewer noticed in the literature several times). The collection is preceded by brief but valuable comments by K. Leichtweiß, who gives also some references to later developments. [Vol. 1: ``Schraublinien, unendliche ebene Gruppen, Geometrie der Speere, Hermitesche Geometrie, Geraden-Kugel-Transformation. (1982; Zbl 0541.01012), Vol. 2: ``Kinematik und Integralgeometrie (1988; Zbl 0646.53002)].

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