Remarks on a paper of Olver

SynopsisSome disparate ideas in the literature are drawn together. The work of P. J. Olver and his associates on Lagrangians which vanish for arbitrary variations, the so-called null Lagrangians, is viewed as a parallel development to Witten's study of topological field theories. A theorem of Olver, that all hyperjacobians are expressible as divergences, and are thus candidates for the construction of null Lagrangians, is shown to follow directly from the observation that such entities appear in a power series development of the general associative product, and this technique facilitates the construction of multi-dimensional examples.