This book provides an introduction to the broad topic of the calculus of variations. It addresses the most natural questions on variational problems and the mathematical complexities they present. Beginning with the scientific modeling that motivates the subject, the book then tackles mathematical questions such as the existence and uniqueness of solutions, their characterization in terms of partial differential equations, and their regularity. It includes both classical and recent results on one-dimensional variational problems, as well as the adaptation to the multi-dimensional case. Here, convexity plays an important role in establishing semi-continuity results and connections with techniques from optimization, and convex duality is even used to produce regularity results. This is then followed by the more classical H
