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Symmetric Criticality In Classical Field Theory, Charles G. Torre

Charles G. Torre

This is a presentation made at the XIX Fall Workshop on Geometry and Physics, held at Porto, Portugal in September 2010. It is a brief overview of work done by Ian Anderson, Mark Fels, and myself on symmetry reduction of Lagrangians and Euler-Lagrange equations, a subject closely related to Palais’ Principle of Symmetric Criticality. After providing a little history, I describe necessary and sufficient conditions on a group action such that reduction of a group-invariant Lagrangian by the symmetry group yields the correct symmetry-reduced Euler-Lagrange equations