Teaching myself some Lagrangian mechanics has so far involved
minimizing the action of a path by integrating taylor series
representations of the paths and then finding stationary points of
this integral with respect to the unknown coefficients.
Pretty much the first time I tried this it came up with a spurious
local minimum.
Is there a way to make the routines in the "optmiz" library find an
alternate point?
Is there a canned numerical constrained optimizer routine?
I recently used mnewton to do optimization with lagrange multipliers
so I know it can be done that way. but I don't want to reinvent the
wheel again if there's a better way.
--
Daniel Lakeland
dlakelan at street-artists.org
http://www.street-artists.org/~dlakelan