Invariants of Conformai and Projective Structures

Abstract

While in Euclidean, equiaffine or centroaffine differential geometry there exists a unique, distinguished normalization of a regular hypersurface immersion x: M ⁿ → Aⁿ⁺¹, in the geometry of the general affine transformation group, there only exists a distinguished class of such normalizations, the class of relative normalizations. Thus, the appropriate invariants for speaking about affine hypersurfaces are invariants of the induced classes, e.g. the conformai class of induced metrics and the projective class of induced conormal connections. The aim of this paper is to study such invariants. As an application, we reformulate the fundamental theorem of affine differential geometry.