No label defined (Q4367752)

The present article is a review of the main results obtained by an Italian research group concerned with the calculus of variations applied to the study of the global geometry of a relativistic spacetime. The paper is a written version of a conference held by the author at the 15th Congress of the Unione Matematica Italiana, U.M.I., in 1995, and it is addressed to a wide audience of mathematicians. The exposition is willingly informal, and very little knowledge from Riemannian and semi-Riemannian geometry is assumed by the author. After a historical introduction, the author discusses in particular the problem of the geodetical connectedness for a Lorentzian manifold. It is presented the case of a manifold given by an orthogonal splitting in a sketchy way, and then the case of a regular static manifold in more detail. The article includes a rich and updated bibliography of recent contributions in the field.