Every centroaffine Tchebychev hyperovaloid is ellipsoid

Overview & Synopsis

We study locally strongly convex Tchebychev hypersurfaces, namely the centroaffine totally umbilical hypersurfaces, in the (n+1)-dimensional affine space Rn+1. We first make an ordinary-looking observation that such hypersurfaces are characterized by having a Riemannian structure admitting a canonically defined closed conformal vector field. Then, by taking advantage of properties about Riemannian manifolds with closed conformal vector fields, we show that the ellipsoids are the only centroaffine Tchebychev hyperovaloids. This solves the longstanding problem of trying to generalize the classical theorem of Blaschke and Deicke on affine hyperspheres in equiaffine differential geometry to that in centroaffine differential geometry.