Abstract: | Laguerre geometry of surfaces in is given in the book of Blaschke [Vorlesungen über Differentialgeometrie, Springer, Berlin Heidelberg New York (1929)], and has been studied by Musso and Nicolodi [Trans. Am. Math. soc. 348, 4321–4337 (1996); Abh. Math. Sem. Univ. Hamburg 69, 123–138 (1999); Int. J. Math. 11(7), 911–924 (2000)], Palmer [Remarks on a variation problem in Laguerre geometry. Rendiconti di Mathematica, Serie VII, Roma, vol. 19, pp. 281–293 (1999)] and other authors. In this paper we study Laguerre differential geometry of hypersurfaces in . For any umbilical free hypersurface with non-zero principal curvatures we define a Laguerre invariant metric g on M and a Laguerre invariant self-adjoint operator : TM → TM, and show that is a complete Laguerre invariant system for hypersurfaces in with n≥ 4. We calculate the Euler–Lagrange equation for the Laguerre volume functional of Laguerre metric by using Laguerre invariants. Using the Euclidean space , the semi-Euclidean space and the degenerate space we define three Laguerre space forms , and and define the Laguerre embeddings and , analogously to what happens in the Moebius geometry where we have Moebius space forms S n , and (spaces of constant curvature) and conformal embeddings and [cf. Liu et al. in Tohoku Math. J. 53, 553–569 (2001) and Wang in Manuscr. Math. 96, 517–534 (1998)]. Using these Laguerre embeddings we can unify the Laguerre geometry of hypersurfaces in , and . As an example we show that minimal surfaces in or are Laguerre minimal in .C. Wang Partially supported by RFDP and Chuang-Xin-Qun-Ti of NSFC. |