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 is a convex body such that for every -dimensional subspace the centroids of the sections are collinear, then 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.
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