ABSTRACT
In this chapter we outline the basic ideas providing the methodological framework for “line integral methods”, along with its application to derive energyconserving methods for Hamiltonian problems. The exposition of this chapter has been deliberately made as simple as possible, so that even the reader who has never confronted such material should easily familiarize with it. The main aim here is to present the foundation of the theory and to support the motivation for devising such methods by means of some simple illustrative examples.1
