Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. No notes or highlighting. Dustcover has a lot of wear but actual book in great condition. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> The present work seeks to portray the calculus of variations as a central and unifying discipline in both mathematics and theoretical physics. This influence is essentially due to the Hamilton-Jacobi theory (which accounts for the title of the book). Although the calculus of variations proper is in the first instance concerned with curves (or subspaces) which afford extreme values to given single (or multiple) integrals it would seem that this unifying effect is not so much a direct consequence of such ‘extremal’ aspects but is due rather to the properties of certain congruences of curves (or families of subspaces) associated with variational problems. The study of these con- gruences and families is the subject-matter of the Hamilton-Jacobi theory. Although self-contained this book is therefore not to be regarded as a textbook on the calculus of variations as such. Instead it is concerned with certain definite aspects of this subject and the remarkably wide scope of their implications. Thus much of the ground usually covered in books on the cal- culus of variations is barely mentioned in the present text and because of this the last section of the introductory chapter is partly devoted to a list of topics not treated here. Nevertheless from the point of view of motivation it is cer- tainly convenient to begin with the usual formulation of variational problems in forme of extreme values