Selected Chapters in the Calculus of Variations

Jürgen Moser978-3-7643-2185-7, 978-3-0348-8057-2

These lecture notes describe a new development in the calculus of variations called Aubry-Mather-Theory. The starting point for the theoretical physicist Aubry was the description of the motion of electrons in a two-dimensional crystal in terms of a simple model. To do so, Aubry investigated a discrete variational problem and the corresponding minimals.