This book is a slightly augmented version of a set of lec- tures on
optimization which I held at the University of Got- tingen in the winter
semester 1983/84. The lectures were in- tended to give an introduction
to the foundations and an im- pression of the applications of
optimization theory. Since in- finite dimensional problems were also to
be treated and one could only assume a minimal knowledge of functional
analysis, the necessary tools from functional analysis were almost com-
pletely developed during the course of the semester. The most important
aspects of the course are the duality theory for convex programming and
necessary optimality conditions for nonlinear optimization problems;
here we strive to make the geometric background particularly clear. For
lack of time and space we were not able to go into several important
problems in optimization - e. g. vector optimization, geometric program-
ming and stability theory. I am very grateful to various people for
their help in pro- ducing this text. R. Schaback encouraged me to
publish my lec- tures and put me in touch with the Vieweg-Verlag. W.
BrUbach and O. Herbst proofread the manuscript; the latter also pro-
duced the drawings and assembled the index. I am indebted to W. LUck for
valuable suggestions for improvement. I am also particularly grateful to
R. Switzer, who translated the German text into English. Finally I wish
to thank Frau P. Trapp for her Gare and patience in typing the final
version.
