A note on modified Veselov-Novikov hierarchy

Because of its relevance to lower-dimensional conformal geometry, known as a generalized Weierstrass inducing, the modified Veselov-Novikov (mVN) hierarchy attracts renewed interest recently. It has been shown explicitly in the literature that an extrinsic string action a la Polyakov (Willmore functional) is invariant under deformations associated to the first member of the mVN hierarchy. In this note we go one step further and show the explicit invariance of the functional under deformations associated to all higher members of the hierarchy. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.