Download or read book Branching Solutions to One-dimensional Variational Problems written by Alexander O. Ivanov and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2001 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book deals with the new class of one-dimensional variational problems OCo the problems with branching solutions. Instead of extreme curves (mappings of a segment to a manifold) we investigate extreme networks, which are mappings of graphs (one-dimensional cell complexes) to a manifold. Various applications of the approach are presented, such as several generalizations of the famous Steiner problem of finding the shortest network spanning given points of the plane. Contents: Preliminary Results; Networks Extremality Criteria; Linear Networks in R N; Extremals of Length Type Functionals: The Case of Parametric Networks; Extremals of Functionals Generated by Norms. Readership: Researchers in differential geometry and topology."