The great mathematicians of Classical times were very interested in variational problems. An example is the famous problem of the brachistochrone: find the shape of a curve with given start and end points along which a body will fall in the shortest possible time. The answer is (part of) an upside-down cycloid, where a cycloid is the path traced by a point on the rim of a rolling circle. More important for the purposes of this article is the nature of the problem: from among a class of curves, select the one that minimizes some quantity.

Variational problems can be put into Banach space language too. The space of curves is the Banach space, the quantity to be minimized is some functional (a function with functions, rather than simply numbers, as input) defined on the Banach space, and the methods of analysis can be used to determine the minimum. This approach can be generalized even further, leading to what is now called global analysis.

Global analysis has many applications to mathematical physics. Euler and the French mathematician Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis discovered that the whole of Newtonian mechanics can be restated in terms of a variational principle: mechanical systems move in a manner that minimizes (or, more technically, extremizes) a functional known as action. The French mathematician Pierre de Fermat stated a similar principle for optics, known as the principle of least time: light rays follow paths that minimize the total time of travel. Later the Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton found a unified theory that includes both optics and mechanics under the general notion of a Hamiltonian system—nowadays subsumed into a yet more general and abstract theory known as symplectic geometry.

An especially fascinating area of global analysis concerns the Plateau problem. The blind Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau (using an assistant as his eyes) spent many years observing the form of soap films and bubbles. He found that if a wire frame in the form of some curve is dipped in a soap solution, then the film forms beautiful curved surfaces. They are called minimal surfaces because they have minimal area subject to spanning the curve. (Their surface tension is proportional to their area, and their energy is proportional to surface tension, so they are actually energy-minimizing films.) For example, a soap bubble is spherical because a sphere has the smallest surface area, subject to enclosing a given volume of air. The accompanying photograph shows the German architect Frei Otto’s use of minimal surface techniques to design a lightweight and spacious covering for the West German pavilion at the international exposition held in Montreal in 1967.

The mathematics of minimal surfaces is an exciting area of current research with many attractive unsolved problems and conjectures. One of the major triumphs of global analysis occurred in 1976 when the American mathematicians Jean Taylor and Frederick Almgren obtained the mathematical derivation of the Plateau conjecture, which states that, when several soap films join together (for example, when several bubbles meet each other along common interfaces), the angles at which the films meet are either 120 degrees (for three films) or approximately 108 degrees (for four films). Plateau had conjectured this from his experiments.

Constructive analysis

One philosophical feature of traditional analysis, which worries mathematicians whose outlook is especially concrete, is that many basic theorems assert the existence of various numbers or functions but do not specify what those numbers or functions are. For instance, the completeness property of the real numbers indicates that every Cauchy sequence converges but not what it converges to. A school of analysis initiated by the American mathematician Errett Bishop has developed a new framework for analysis in which no object can be deemed to exist unless a specific rule is given for constructing it. This school is known as constructive analysis, and its devotees have shown that it is just as rich in structure as traditional analysis and that most of the traditional theorems have analogs within the constructive framework. This philosophy has its origins in the earlier work of the Dutch mathematician-logician L.E.J. Brouwer, who criticized “mainstream” mathematical logicians for accepting proofs that mathematical objects exist without there being any specific construction of them (for example, a proof that some series converges without any specification of the limit which it converges to). Brouwer founded an entire school of mathematical logic, known as intuitionism, to advance his views.

However, constructive analysis remains on the fringes of the mathematical mainstream, probably because most mathematicians accept classical existence proofs and see no need for the additional mathematical baggage involved in carrying out analysis constructively. Nevertheless, constructive analysis is very much in the same algorithmic spirit as computer science, and in the future there may be some fruitful interaction with this area.

Nonstandard analysis

A very different philosophy—pretty much the exact opposite of constructive analysis—leads to nonstandard analysis, a slightly misleading name. Nonstandard analysis arose from the work of the German-born mathematician Abraham Robinson in mathematical logic, and it is best described as a variant of real analysis in which infinitesimals and infinities genuinely exist—without any paradoxes. In nonstandard analysis, for example, one can define the limit a of a sequence a_n to be the unique real number (if any) such that |a_n − a| is infinitesimal for all infinite integers n.

Generations of students have spent years learning, painfully, not to think that way when studying analysis. Now it turns out that such thinking is entirely rigorous, provided that it is carried out in a rather subtle context. As well as the usual systems of real numbers ℝ and natural numbers ℕ, nonstandard analysis introduces two more extensive systems of nonstandard real numbers ℝ* and nonstandard natural numbers ℕ*. The system ℝ* includes numbers that are infinitesimal relative to ordinary real numbers ℝ. That is, nonzero nonstandard real numbers exist that are smaller than any nonzero standard real number. (What cannot be done is to have nonzero nonstandard real numbers that are smaller than any nonzero nonstandard real number, which is impossible for the same reason that no infinitesimal real numbers exist.) In a similar way, ℝ* also includes numbers that are infinite relative to ordinary real numbers.

In a very strong sense, it can be shown that nonstandard analysis accurately mimics the whole of traditional analysis. However, it brings dramatic new methods to bear, and it has turned out, for example, to offer an interesting new approach to stochastic differential equations—like standard differential equations but subject to random noise. As with constructive analysis, nonstandard analysis sits outside the mathematical mainstream, but its prospects of joining the mainstream seem excellent.