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In this paper we study the curvature flow of a curve in a plane endowed with a minkowskian norm whose unit ball is smooth. We show that many of the properties known in the euclidean case can be extended (with due adaptations) to this new situation. In particular, we show that simple, closed, strictly convex, smooth curves remain so until the area enclosed by them vanishes. Moreover, their isoperimetric ratios converge to the minimum possible value, only attained by the minkowskian circle - so these curves converge to a minkowskian "circular point" as the enclosed area approaches zero., Comment: 18 pages, 2 figures

In this paper we consider planar polygons with parallel opposite sides. This type of polygons can be regarded as discretizations of closed convex planar curves by taking tangent lines at samples with pairwise parallel tangents. For this class of polygons, we define discrete versions of the area evolute, central symmetry set, equidistants and area parallels and show that they behave quite similarly to their smooth counterparts., Comment: 17 pages, 11 figures

In this paper we discuss some affine properties of convex equal-area polygons, which are convex polygons such that all triangles formed by three consecutive vertices have the same area. Besides being able to approximate closed convex smooth curves almost uniformly with respect to affine length, convex equal-area polygons admit natural definitions of the usual affine differential geometry concepts, like affine normal and affine curvature. These definitions lead to discrete analogous of the six vertices theorem and an affine isoperimetric inequality. One can also define discrete counterparts of the affine evolute, parallels and the affine distance symmetry set preserving many of the properties valid for smooth curves., Comment: 16 pages, 10 figures

Given a pair of planar curves, one can define its generalized area distance, a concept that generalizes the area distance of a single curve. In this paper, we show that the generalized area distance of a pair of planar curves is an improper indefinite affine spheres with singularities, and, reciprocally, every indefinite improper affine sphere in $\R^3$ is the generalized distance of a pair of planar curves. Considering this representation, the singularity set of the improper affine sphere corresponds to the area evolute of the pair of curves, and this fact allows us to describe a clear geometric picture of the former. Other symmetry sets of the pair of curves, like the affine area symmetry set and the affine envelope symmetry set can be also used to describe geometric properties of the improper affine sphere., Comment: 14 pages 7 figures

The volume distance from a point p to a convex hypersurface M of the (N+1)-dimensional space is defined as the minimum (N+1)-volume of a region bounded by M and a hyperplane H through the point. This function is differentiable in a neighborhood of M and if we restrict its hessian to the minimizing hyperplane H(p) we obtain, after normalization, a symmetric bi-linear form Q. In this paper, we prove that Q converges to the affine Blaschke metric when we approximate the hypersurface along a curve whose points are centroids of parallel sections. We also show that the rate of this convergence is given by a bilinear form associated with the shape operator of M. These convergence results provide a geometric interpretation of the Blaschke metric and the shape operator in terms of the volume distance., Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures