Download or read book Branching Solutions To One-dimensional Variational Problems written by Alexandr Ivanov and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2001-01-17 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 — 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.