The Bernstein problem for affine maximal hypersurfaces

Abstract.

In this paper, we prove the validity of the Chern conjecture in affine geometry [18], namely that an affine maximal graph of a smooth, locally uniformly convex function on two dimensional Euclidean space, R ², must be a paraboloid. More generally, we shall consider the n-dimensional case, R ⁿ, showing that the corresponding result holds in higher dimensions provided that a uniform, “strict convexity” condition holds. We also extend the notion of “affine maximal” to non-smooth convex graphs and produce a counterexample showing that the Bernstein result does not hold in this generality for dimension n≥10.