ABSTRACT
Panofsky and Dutton3 offer an application of Lagrange multipliers that is of interest here for two reasons. In addition to being an illustration of the mathematical method I am discussing here, it also explains an important physical phenomenon: why the distribution of particle speeds in a gas has a Gaussian distribution. It is of interest in remote sensing because the absorption coefficients of gases depend, in part, on the velocity distribution of the gas particles (cf. §2.5).
