This volume presents a set of never-before-published notes from lectures given by S.-S. Chern in 1951 on the topic of “Minimal Submanifolds in a Riemannian Manifold.”

Also presented are five of Chern’s expository papers which complement the lecture notes and provide an overview of the scope and power of differential geometry: From Triangles to Manifolds, Curves and Surfaces in Euclidean Space, Characteristic Classes and Characteristic Forms, Geometry and Physics, and The Geometry of G-Structures.