Lie sphere transformations and the focal sets of hyper-surfaces

Miscellaneous · Fri Jan 01 00:00:00 EST 1988

OSTI ID:7184048

Buyske, S G

Isoparametric hypersurfaces of euclidean or spherical space are those with constant principal curvatures. The image of the hypersurface under a conformal transformation of the ambient space will no longer be isoparametric, but will be Dupin: the principal curvatures will be constant in the principal directions. Dupin hypersurfaces are closely related to taut hypersurfaces, for which almost every distance function is a perfect Morse function (the number of critical points is the minimum for the topology of the hypersurface). A weaker concept is tightness, for which almost every linear height function is required to be a perfect Morse function. Dupin and taut hypersurfaces are preserved not just under conformal, or Moebuius, transformations but also under the more general Lie sphere transformations. Roughly speaking, these are generated by Moebius transformations and parallel transformations. The purpose of this thesis is to study certain taut or Dupin hypersurfaces under Lie sphere transformations including the effect on the focal set. The thesis is divided into four sections. After the introduction, the method of studying hypersurfaces as Lie sphere objects is developed. The third section extends the concepts of tightness and tautness of semi-euclidean space. The final section shows that if a hypersurface is the Lie sphere image of certain standard constructions (tubes, cylinders, and rotations), the resulting family of curvature spheres is taut in the Lie quadric.

• Research Organization: Brown Univ., Providence, RI (USA)
• OSTI ID: 7184048
• Resource Relation: Other Information: Thesis (Ph. D.)
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

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