principle of least action

…mathematician Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis’s principle of least action (c. 1744), which sought to explain all processes as driven by a demand that some property be economized or minimized. In particular, minimizing an integral, called an action integral, led several mathematicians (most notably the Italian-French Joseph-Louis Lagrange in the 18th…

…extremal principles (such as the principle of least action). The extremal principle usually yields information about an integral involving the sought-for function, hence the name integral equation. Hilbert’s contribution was to bring together many different strands of contemporary work and to show how they could be elucidated if cast in…

…extremal principle in mechanics, the principle of least action, was proposed by the French mathematician and astronomer Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis but rigorously stated only much later, especially by the Irish mathematician and scientist William Rowan Hamilton in 1835. Though very general, it is well enough illustrated by a simple…

…quantum mechanics governed by the principle of least action. This approach replaced the wave-oriented electromagnetic picture developed by James Clerk Maxwell with one based entirely on particle interactions mapped in space and time. In effect, Feynman’s method calculated the probabilities of all the possible paths a particle could take in…

In 1744 Maupertuis enunciated the principle of least action, later published in his Essai de cosmologie (1750; “Essay on Cosmology”). It states simply that “in all the changes that take place in the universe, the sum of the products of each body multiplied by the distance it moves and by…