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Remarks on a paper of Olver

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 November 2011

D. B. Fairlie
D. B. Fairlie
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Durham, Durham DH1 3LE, England, U.K.
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Synopsis

Some disparate ideas in the literature are drawn together. The work of P. J. Olver and his associates on Lagrangians which vanish for arbitrary variations, the so-called null Lagrangians, is viewed as a parallel development to Witten's study of topological field theories. A theorem of Olver, that all hyperjacobians are expressible as divergences, and are thus candidates for the construction of null Lagrangians, is shown to follow directly from the observation that such entities appear in a power series development of the general associative product, and this technique facilitates the construction of multi-dimensional examples.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh Section A: Mathematics , Volume 119 , Issue 3-4 , 1991 , pp. 213 - 217
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Society of Edinburgh 1991

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