Demeter Krupka Boeken

This volume contains invited lectures and selected research papers in the fields of classical and modern differential geometry, global analysis, and geometric methods in physics, presented at the 10th International Conference on Differential Geometry and its Applications (DGA2007), held in Olomouc, Czech Republic.The book covers recent developments and the latest results in the following Riemannian geometry, connections, jets, differential invariants, the calculus of variations on manifolds, differential equations, Finsler structures, and geometric methods in physics. It is also a celebration of the 300th anniversary of the birth of one of the greatest mathematicians, Leonhard Euler, and includes the Euler lecture "Leonhard Euler -- 300 years on" by R Wilson. Notable contributors include J F Cariñena, M Castrillón López, J Erichhorn, J-H Eschenburg, I Kolář, A P Kopylov, J Korbas, O Kowalski, B Kruglikov, D Krupka, O Krupková, R Léandre, Haizhong Li, S Maeda, M A Malakhaltsev, O I Mokhov, J Muñoz Masqué, S Preston, V Rovenski, D J Saunders, M Sekizawa, J Slovák, J Szilasi, L Tamássy, P Walczak, and others.

The book is devoted to recent research in the global variational theory on smooth manifolds. Its main objective is an extension of the classical variational calculus on Euclidean spaces to (topologically nontrivial) finite-dimensional smooth manifolds; to this purpose the methods of global analysis of differential forms are used. Emphasis is placed on the foundations of the theory of variational functionals on fibered manifolds - relevant geometric structures for variational principles in geometry, physical field theory and higher-order fibered mechanics. The book chapters include: - foundations of jet bundles and analysis of differential forms and vector fields on jet bundles, - the theory of higher-order integral variational functionals for sections of a fibred space, the (global) first variational formula in infinitesimal and integral forms- extremal conditions and the discussion of Noether symmetries and generalizations,- the inverse problems of the calculus of variations of Helmholtz type- variational sequence theory and its consequences for the global inverse problem (cohomology conditions)- examples of variational functionals of mathematical physics. Complete formulations and proofs of all basic assertions are given, based on theorems of global analysis explained in the Appendix.