Introduction to the Calculus of Variations

The calculus of variations is one of the oldest subjects in mathematics, yet is very much alive and is still evolving. Besides its mathematical importance and its links to other branches of mathematics, such as geometry or differential equations, it is widely used in physics, engineering, economics and biology.

This book serves both as a guide to the expansive existing literature and as an aid to the non-specialist -- mathematicians, physicists, engineers, students or researchers -- in discovering the subject s most important problems, results and techniques. Despite the aim of addressing non-specialists, mathematical rigor has not been sacrificed; most of the theorems are either fully proved or proved under more stringent conditions.

In this new edition, the chapter on regularity has been significantly expanded and 27 new exercises have been added. The book, containing a total of 103 exercises with detailed solutions, is well designed for a course at both undergraduate and graduate levels.

Contents: Preliminaries; Classical Methods; Direct Methods: Existence; Direct Methods: Regularity; Minimal Surfaces; Isoperimetric Inequality; Solutions to the Exercises.