Calculus of variations provides a unifying language for problems in which the state or trajectory of a system is determined by extremising an energy or action functional. Rooted in classical mechanics ...

Calculus to the level of ODEs, partial derivative and multiple integrals, some knowledge of PDEs helpful but not essential. Students should have a certain comfort level with dealing with advanced ...

Calculus of variations establishes a framework to determine the extrema of functionals—mappings from functions to real numbers—which has been pivotal in elucidating natural principles such as the ...