English

A Characterization of Quadrics Among Affine Hyperspheres by Section-Centroid Location

Differential Geometry 2026-01-13 v1

Abstract

A theorem of Meyer and Reisner characterizes ellipsoids by the collinearity of centroids of parallel sections: if ΩRn+1\Omega\subset\mathbb{R}^{n+1} is a convex body such that for every nn-dimensional subspace MRn+1M\subset\mathbb{R}^{n+1} the centroids of the sections (x+M)Ω(x+M)\cap \Omega are collinear, then Ω\Omega is an ellipsoid. We study natural extensions of this centroid-collinearity condition to unbounded convex sets. In particular, we show that among affine hyperspheres, precisely the ellipsoids, paraboloids and one sheet of a two-sheeted hyperboloid satisfy this property. We also identify additional assumptions under which any convex hypersurface with this property must necessarily be a quadric.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.06107,
  title  = {A Characterization of Quadrics Among Affine Hyperspheres by Section-Centroid Location},
  author = {Alexandre Borentain},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.06107},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

13 pages, 1 figure