A stylish and inspiring guide to living a happier life in balance with the natural world Minimal offers readers inspiration and tools to embrace simple living and create meaningful, lasting change in their lives. From advice on home decorating and decluttering, and easy-to-follow recipes for making your own cosmetics and cleaning products, to tips for shopping sustainably, composting, and restoring old furniture, Minimal provides a host of small but powerful ways to live a more balanced life while being good to the planet.

Draws on some of the world's most architecturally significant regions, from Brazil and New Zealand to Florida and Singapore, to demonstrate key designs that were directly influenced by tropical climates, beach landscapes, and regional artistry, in a lavishly photographed volume that dedicates six chapters to minimal design effects.

In Minimal Rationality, Christopher Cherniak boldly challenges the myth of Man the the Rational Animal and the central role that the "perfectly rational agent" has had in philosophy, psychology, and other cognitive sciences, as well as in economics. His book presents a more realistic theory based on the limits to rationality which can play a similar generative role in the human sciences, and it seeks to determine the minimal rationality an actual agent must possess.

This book focuses on the classic Steiner Problem and illustrates how results of the problem's development have generated the Theory of Minimal Networks, that is systems of "rubber" branching threads of minimal length. This theory demonstrates a brilliant interconnection among differential and computational geometry, topology, variational calculus, and graph theory. All necessary preliminary information is included, and the book's simplified format and nearly 150 illustrations and tables will help readers develop a concrete understanding of the material. All nontrivial statements are proved, and plenty of exercises are included.

Minimal Surfaces is the first volume of a three volume treatise on minimal surfaces (Grundlehren Nr. 339-341). Each volume can be read and studied independently of the others. The central theme is boundary value problems for minimal surfaces. The treatise is a substantially revised and extended version of the monograph Minimal Surfaces I, II (Grundlehren Nr. 295 & 296). The first volume begins with an exposition of basic ideas of the theory of surfaces in three-dimensional Euclidean space, followed by an introduction of minimal surfaces as stationary points of area, or equivalently, as surfaces of zero mean curvature. The final definition of a minimal surface is that of a nonconstant harmonic mapping X: \Omega\to\R^3 which is conformally parametrized on \Omega\subset\R^2 and may have branch points. Thereafter the classical theory of minimal surfaces is surveyed, comprising many examples, a treatment of Björling ́s initial value problem, reflection principles, a formula of the second variation of area, the theorems of Bernstein, Heinz, Osserman, and Fujimoto. The second part of this volume begins with a survey of Plateau ́s problem and of some of its modifications. One of the main features is a new, completely elementary proof of the fact that area A and Dirichlet integral D have the same infimum in the class C(G) of admissible surfaces spanning a prescribed contour G. This leads to a new, simplified solution of the simultaneous problem of minimizing A and D in C(G), as well as to new proofs of the mapping theorems of Riemann and Korn-Lichtenstein, and to a new solution of the simultaneous Douglas problem for A and D where G consists of several closed components. Then basic facts of stable minimal surfaces are derived; this is done in the context of stable H-surfaces (i.e. of stable surfaces of prescribed mean curvature H), especially of cmc-surfaces (H = const), and leads to curvature estimates for stable, immersed cmc-surfaces and to Nitsche ́s uniqueness theorem and Tomi ́s finiteness result. In addition, a theory of unstable solutions of Plateau ́s problems is developed which is based on Courant ́s mountain pass lemma. Furthermore, Dirichlet ́s problem for nonparametric H-surfaces is solved, using the solution of Plateau ́s problem for H-surfaces and the pertinent estimates.

Minimal Surfaces I is an introduction to the field of minimal surfaces and a presentation of the classical theory as well as of parts of the modern development centered around boundary value problems. Part II deals with the boundary behaviour of minimal surfaces. Part I is particularly apt for students who want to enter this interesting area of analysis and differential geometry which during the last 25 years of mathematical research has been very active and productive. Surveys of various subareas will lead the student to the current frontiers of knowledge and can also be useful to the researcher. The lecturer can easily base courses of one or two semesters on differential geometry on Vol. 1, as many topics are worked out in great detail. Numerous computer-generated illustrations of old and new minimal surfaces are included to support intuition and imagination. Part 2 leads the reader up to the regularity theory for nonlinear elliptic boundary value problems illustrated by a particular and fascinating topic. There is no comparably comprehensive treatment of the problem of boundary regularity of minimal surfaces available in book form. This long-awaited book is a timely and welcome addition to the mathematical literature.

Plateau's problem is a scientific trend in modern mathematics that unites several different problems connected with the study of minimal surfaces. In its simplest version, Plateau's problem is concerned with finding a surface of least area that spans a given fixed one-dimensional contour in three-dimensional space--perhaps the best-known example of such surfaces is provided by soap films. From the mathematical point of view, such films are described as solutions of a second-order partial differential equation, so their behavior is quite complicated and has still not been thoroughly studied. Soap films, or, more generally, interfaces between physical media in equilibrium, arise in many applied problems in chemistry, physics, and also in nature. In applications, one finds not only two-dimensional but also multidimensional minimal surfaces that span fixed closed ``contours'' in some multidimensional Riemannian space. An exact mathematical statement of the problem of finding a surface of least area or volume requires the formulation of definitions of such fundamental concepts as a surface, its boundary, minimality of a surface, and so on. It turns out that there are several natural definitions of these concepts, which permit the study of minimal surfaces by different, and complementary, methods. In the framework of this comparatively small book it would be almost impossible to cover all aspects of the modern problem of Plateau, to which a vast literature has been devoted. However, this book makes a unique contribution to this literature, for the authors' guiding principle was to present the material with a maximum of clarity and a minimum of formalization. Chapter 1 contains historical background on Plateau's problem, referring to the period preceding the 1930s, and a description of its connections with the natural sciences. This part is intended for a very wide circle of readers and is accessible, for example, to first-year graduate students. The next part of the book, comprising Chapters 2-5, gives a fairly complete survey of various modern trends in Plateau's problem. This section is accessible to second- and third-year students specializing in physics and mathematics. The remaining chapters present a detailed exposition of one of these trends (the homotopic version of Plateau's problem in terms of stratified multivarifolds) and the Plateau problem in homogeneous symplectic spaces. This last part is intended for specialists interested in the modern theory of minimal surfaces and can be used for special courses; a command of the concepts of functional analysis is assumed.