Variants on Alexandrov reflection principle and other applications of maximum principle
This paper is part of the autumn school on "Variational problems and higher order PDEs for affine hypersurfaces". We discuss variational problems in equiaffine differential geometry, centroaffine differential geometry and relative differential geometry, which have been studied by Blaschke [Bla], Chern [Ch], C. P. Wang [W], Li-Li-Simon [LLS], and Calabi [Ca-II]. We first derive the Euler-Lagrange equations in these settings; these equations are complicated, strongly nonlinear fourth order PDEs. We...