This book contains expository lectures from the CBMS Regional Conference held at the University of Florida, 1982. The author considers a space formed by all closed curves in which the closed geodesics are characterized as the critical points of a functional, an idea going back to Morse. This exposition gives a refined version of Morse's approach which has several advantages over the old one - in particular, it possesses a canonical $\mathbf O(2)$-action.
| ISBN: | 9780821807033 |
| Publication date: | 30th December 1983 |
| Author: | Wilhelm Klingenberg, Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences |
| Publisher: | American Mathematical Society |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Pagination: | 79 pages |
| Series: | Regional Conference Series in Mathematics |
| Genres: |
Calculus and mathematical analysis Mathematics |