ABSTRACT

In this chapter we discuss several problems that will serve as models and examples for the theory to follow. We first provide rough overviews of some classical problems to give a preliminary indication of the type of mathematical concepts needed to formulate these problems as mathematical optimization problems. We introduce some notation, discuss various classes of functions and briefly review some topics from calculus, advanced calculus, and differential equations. Finally, we close this chapter with precise mathematical statements of some of these model problems.