This book draws a colorful and widespread picture of global affine hypersurface theory up to the most recent state. Moreover, the recent development revealed that affine differential geometry – as differential geometry in general – has an exciting intersection area with other fields of interest, like partial differential equations, global analysis, convex geometry and Riemann surfaces. The second edition of this monograph leads the reader from introductory concepts to recent research. Since the publication of the first edition in 1993 there appeared important new contributions, like the solutions of two different affine Bernstein conjectures, due to Chern and Calabi, respectively. Moreover, a large subclass of hyperbolic affine spheres were classified in recent years, namely the locally strongly convex Blaschke hypersurfaces that have parallel cubic form with respect to the Levi-Civita connection of the Blaschke metric. The authors of this book present such results and new methods of proof.

Writing this book, I had in my mind areader trying to get some knowledge of a part of the modern differential geometry. I concentrate myself on the study of sur faces in the Euclidean 3-space, this being the most natural object for investigation. The global differential geometry of surfaces in E3 is based on two classical results: (i) the ovaloids (i.e., closed surfaces with positive Gauss curvature) with constant Gauss or mean curvature are the spheres, (ü) two isometrie ovaloids are congruent. The results presented here show vast generalizations of these facts. Up to now, there is only one book covering this area of research: the Lecture Notes [3] written in the tensor slang. In my book, I am using the machinary of E. Cartan's calculus. It should be equivalent to the tensor calculus; nevertheless, using it I get better results (but, honestly, sometimes it is too complicated). It may be said that almost all results are new and belong to myself (the exceptions being the introductory three chapters, the few classical results and results of my post graduate student Mr. M. ÄFWAT who proved Theorems V.3.1, V.3.3 and VIII.2.1-6).

Contents:Progress in Affine Differential Geometry — Problem List and Continued Bibliography (T Binder & U Simon)On the Classification of Timelike Bonnet Surfaces (W H Chen & H Z Li)Affine Hyperspheres with Constant Affine Sectional Curvature (F Dillen et al.)Geometric Properties of the Curvature Operator (P Gilkey)On a Question of S S Chern Concerning Minimal Hypersurfaces of Spheres (I Hiric( & L Verstraelen)Parallel Pure Spinors on Pseudo-Riemannian Manifolds (I Kath)Twistorial Construction of Spacelike Surfaces in Lorentzian 4-Manifolds (F Leitner)Nirenberg's Problem in 90's (L Ma)A New Proof of the Homogeneity of Isoparametric Hypersurfaces with (g,m) = (6, 1) (R Miyaoka)Harmonic Maps and Negatively Curved Homogeneous Spaces (S Nishikawa)Biharmonic Morphisms Between Riemannian Manifolds (Y L Ou)Intrinsic Properties of Real Hypersurfaces in Complex Space Forms (P J Ryan)On the Nonexistence of Stable Minimal Submanifolds in Positively Pinched Riemannian Manifolds (Y B Shen & H Q Xu)Geodesic Mappings of the Ellipsoid (K Voss)η-Invariants and the Poincaré-Hopf Index Formula (W Zhang)and other papers Readership: Researchers in differential geometry and topology. Keywords:Conference;Proceedings;Berlin (Germany);Beijing (China);Geometry;Topology;Submanifolds X;Differential Geometry;Dedication