On John Mather's seminal contributions in Hamiltonian dynamics (Q2278147)

This manuscript presents an overview of what is nowadays called Mather's theory: a set of ideas and results for Lagrangian systems, that John Mather started to develop in the early 1990s in order to tackle the problem of Arnold diffusion and to understand the onset of chaos in classical mechanics. There are seven sections called as follows: In the beginning there were KAM tori ...; Setting: Tonelli Lagrangians and Hamiltonians; Cartoon example: Action minimizing properties of integrable systems; Action-minimizing measures and Mather sets; Mather's \(\alpha\) and \(\beta \)-functions; Action-minimizing curves and more invariant sets; Some topological and symplectic properties of the Aubry and Mañé sets.