Critical Point Theory for Lagrangian Systems

Download or read book Critical Point Theory for Lagrangian Systems written by Marco Mazzucchelli and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-11-16 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lagrangian systems constitute a very important and old class in dynamics. Their origin dates back to the end of the eighteenth century, with Joseph-Louis Lagrange’s reformulation of classical mechanics. The main feature of Lagrangian dynamics is its variational flavor: orbits are extremal points of an action functional. The development of critical point theory in the twentieth century provided a powerful machinery to investigate existence and multiplicity questions for orbits of Lagrangian systems. This monograph gives a modern account of the application of critical point theory, and more specifically Morse theory, to Lagrangian dynamics, with particular emphasis toward existence and multiplicity of periodic orbits of non-autonomous and time-periodic systems.