#### Volume 15, issue 4 (2011)

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On intrinsic geometry of surfaces in normed spaces

### Dmitri Burago and Sergei Ivanov

Geometry & Topology 15 (2011) 2275–2298
##### Abstract

We prove three facts about intrinsic geometry of surfaces in a normed (Minkowski) space. When put together, these facts demonstrate a rather intriguing picture. We show that (1) geodesics on saddle surfaces (in a space of any dimension) behave as they are expected to: they have no conjugate points and thus minimize length in their homotopy class; (2) in contrast, every two-dimensional Finsler manifold can be locally embedded as a saddle surface in a $4$–dimensional space; and (3) geodesics on convex surfaces in a $3$–dimensional space also behave as they are expected to: on a complete strictly convex surface, no complete geodesic minimizes the length globally.

##### Keywords
Finsler metric, saddle surface, convex surface, geodesic
##### Mathematical Subject Classification 2010
Primary: 53C22, 53C60
Secondary: 53C45