Calculus of Variations

Pioneers of calculus, such as Pierre de Fermat and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, saw that the derivative gave a way to find maxima (maximum values) and minima (minimum values) of a function f(x) of a real variable x, since f′(x) = 0 at all such points. However, real variable optimization problems were not the first in the history of analysis. Since ancient times, mathematicians sought to optimize quantities that depended on varying a function. Here are three classic problems where the function (in this case a curve) varies.

• The isoperimetric problem. Often traced back to the legendary Queen Dido of Carthage, this problem asks what kind of curve of a given length encloses the greatest area. The answer is a circle, though the proof is not obvious. The hardest part is proving the very existence of an area-maximizing curve, which was not done satisfactorily until the 19th century.
• Light path problems. In the 1st century ce, Heron of Alexandria noticed that the law of reflection—angle of incidence equals angle of reflection—could be restated by saying that reflected light takes the shortest path—or the shortest time, assuming it has finite speed. About 1660 Pierre de Fermat generalized this idea to a least-time principle for all light rays (reintroducing a teleological principle in science). Assuming that light takes the path of minimum time from a point in one medium to a point in another medium where the speed of light is different, Fermat was able to show that the change between the angle of incidence and the angle of refraction depends on the change in the speed of light through the two mediums. Expressed formally assin (angle of incidence)/speed of incidence = sin (angle of refraction)/speed of refraction,Fermat’s generalization explained Snell’s law of refraction sin (angle of incidence)/sin (angle of refraction) = constant,found experimentally in 1621.
• The brachistochrone problem. In 1696 Johann Bernoulli posed the problem of finding the curve on which a particle takes the shortest time to descend under its own weight without friction. This curve, called the brachistochrone (from Greek, “shortest time”), turned out to be the cycloid, the curve traced by a point on the circumference of a circle as it rolls along a straight line. (See

  

  figure.) The solution was found independently by Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Jakob Bernoulli, and Johann Bernoulli himself. Johann’s solution is particularly interesting because it uses Fermat’s principle of least time, replacing the descending particle by a light ray in a medium in which the speed of light varies. In this situation, light follows a curve, with “angle of incidence” equal to the angle between the tangent to the curve and the vertical. The “light speed” at height y being that of a freely falling particle, Fermat’s version of Snell’s law then gives the direction of the tangent at height y. The result is a differential equation for y, whose solution is the cycloid.

In the 18th century Leonhard Euler and Joseph-Louis Lagrange solved general classes of optimization problems, such as finding shortest curves on surfaces, by finding a differential equation satisfied by the optimal member in a certain class of functions. Because their method made “small variations” in the hypothetical optimal function, the subject came to be called the calculus of variations. Its fundamental importance was underlined in 1846 when Pierre de Maupertuis proposed the principle of least action, a sweeping generalization of Fermat’s principle that was supposed to explain all of mechanics.

Action is the integral of energy with respect to time, and the correct principle is actually not least action but stationary action (in some cases, the action is a maximum). In the 1830s William Rowan Hamilton showed that all the classical laws of mechanics follow from the assumption of stationary action and, conversely, that the classical laws imply stationary action. Thus, all classical mechanics can be encapsulated in a simple, coordinate-free principle involving just energy and time. An even greater tribute to the principle is that it yields the relativity theory and quantum mechanics of the 20th century.