... of the material in these notes was taken from the following texts: Bliss - Calculus of Variations, Carus monograph - Open Court Publishing Co - 1924 Gelfand & Fomin - Calculus of Variations - ... Prentice Hall 1963 Forray - Variational Calculus - McGraw Hill 1968 Weinstock - Calculus of Variations - Dover 1974 J D Logan - Applied Mathematics, Second Edition -John Wiley 1997 The figures ... simplest of all the problems of the calculus of variations is doubtless that of determining the shortest arc joining two given points The co-ordinates of these points will be ∗ We shall later speak of...