Calculus of variations establishes a framework to determine the extrema of functionals—mappings from functions to real numbers—which has been pivotal in elucidating natural principles such as the ...

The so-called Ritz–Galerkin method is one of the most fundamental tools of modern computing. Its origins lie in Hilbert's "direct" approach to the variational calculus of Euler–Lagrange and in the ...

Calculus to the level of ODEs, partial derivative and multiple integrals, some knowledge of PDEs helpful but not essential. Students should have a certain comfort level with dealing with advanced ...