The family of cones is one of typical models of non-cylindrical ruled surfaces. Among them, the circular cones are unique in the sense that their Gauss map satisfies a partial differential equation similar, though not identical, to one characterizing the so-called 1-type submanifolds. Specifically, for the Gauss map G of a circular cone, one has ∆G = f (G + C), where ∆ is the Laplacian operator, f is a non-zero function and C is a constant vector. We prove that circular cones are characterized by being the only non-cylindrical ruled surfaces with ∆G = f (G + C) for a nonzero constant vector C.
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