Description: In this volume, Ekeland and Turnbull are mainly concerned with existence theory. They seek to determine whether, when given an optimization problem consisting of minimizing a functional over some feasible set, an optimal solution--a minimizer--may be found.
Brief description: Ivar Ekeland is professor of mathematics and economics at the University of British Columbia and director of the Pacific Institute for Mathematical Sciences. He is the author of several books, including Mathematics and the Unexpected and The Broken Dice, both published by the University of Chicago Press.