Centroaffine First Order Invariants of Surfaces in IR4

An investigation of the centroaffine geometry of surfaces in IR⁴ leads to the centroaffine first order invariants: the vector bundle valued second fundamental form, the affine semiconformal structure, the h³-semiconformal structure and the centroaffine metric. A classification of surfaces by their semiconformal structures according to signature and rank is given. This involves the study of the orbits of two pencils of symmetric bilinear forms on IR² under a change of basis. Combined with previous results ([Nomizu-Sasaki 93]) a complete classification of the zero-degenerate surfaces is obtained and examples of the other surface types are constructed.