scientific article; zbMATH DE number 1474990

Publication date 7 February 2002

affine completeness affine maximal hypersurface affine mean curvature convex surface elliptic parabaloid

Nonlinear elliptic equations (35J60) Minimal surfaces in differential geometry, surfaces with prescribed mean curvature (53A10) Affine differential geometry (53A15)

Review text

The topic of hypersurfaces with vanishing unimodular affine mean curvature was first treated in the article [\textit{S. S. Chern}, Proc. Japan-United States Sem., Tokyo, 1977, 17-30 (1979; Zbl 0439.53008)]. They were called ``affine minimal for obvious comparison with the Euclidean case. Moreover, this also led that author to compare with the corresponding Bernstein problem and formulate the following conjecture: ``A Euclidean complete, affine minimal, locally strongly convex surface in \(\mathbb{R}^3\) must be an elliptic parabaloid. Of course, this statement has a natural extension to higher dimensions. Later on, the problem was treated by Calabi who showed, first, that a more suitable name for such hypersurfaces would be that of ``affine maximal, due to the fact that if a hypersurface \(M\) is a critical point of the area functional \(A\), the second variation of \(A\) at \(M\) is non-positive, that is, the affine area \(A(M)\) reaches a maximum under smooth interior perturbations. Then, he verified the conjecture under the hypothesis that the affine metric of \(M\) be complete [\textit{E. Calabi}, Am. J. Math. 104, 91-126 (1982; Zbl 0501.53037)]. In this note, the authors solve Chern's conjecture for dimensions \(n=2,3\). More precisely, they prove the following: Theorem. Let \(x_{n+1}=f(x_1,\dots,x_n)\) be a strictly convex function defined for all \((x_1,\dots, x_n)\in \mathbb{R}^n\). Suppose that \(M=\{(x_1, \dots,x_n, f(x_1, \dots,x_n))\}\) is an affine maximal hypersurface, then in the case \(n=2\) or \(n=3\), \(M\) must be an elliptic parabaloid.

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