The Principle of Least Action

Alberto Rojo is Associate Professor at Oakland University, Michigan. He is a Fulbright specialist in Physics Education and was awarded the Jack Williams Endowed Chair in Science and Humanities from the University of Eastern New Mexico. His research focuses primarily on theoretical condensed matter and he has previously published books in the popular science field. Anthony Bloch is the Alexander Ziwet Collegiate Professor of Mathematics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He has received various awards including a Presidential Young Investigator Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Simons Fellowship, and he is Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), and the American Mathematical Society (AMS). He has served on the editorial boards of various journals and is currently Editor-in-Chief of the SIAM Journal of Control and Optimization.

1. Introduction; 2. Prehistory of variational principles; 3. An excursio to Newton's Principia; 4. The optical-mechanical analogy, part I; 5. D'Alembert, Lagrange, and the statics-dynamics analogy; 6. The optical mechanical analogy, part II: the Hamilton–Jacobi equation; 7. Relativity and least action; 8. The road to quantum mechanics; Appendix A. Newton's solid of least resistance using calculus; Appendix B. Original statement of D'Alembert's principle; Appendix C. Equations of motion of MacCullagh's ether; Appendix D. Characteristic function for a parabolic Keplerian orbit; Appendix E. Saddle paths for reections on a mirror; Appendix F. Kinetic caustics from quantum motion in one dimension; Appendix G. Einstein's proof of the covariance of Maxwell's equations; Appendix H. Relativistic four vector potential; Appendix I. Ehrenfest's proof of the adiabatic theorem; References; Index.