
Preface to the first edition
The topic of this book has a long history. Its fundamentals were laid down
by icons of mathematics like Euler and Lagrange. It was once heralded as
the panacea for all engineering optimization problems by suggesting that all
one needs to do was to apply the Euler-Lagrange equation form and solve the
resulting differential equation.
This, as most all encompassing solutions, turned out to be not always true
and the resulting differential equations are not necessarily easy to solve. On
the other hand, many of the differential equations commonly used by engi-
neers today are derived from a variational problem. Hence, it is importan ...