Conservation laws for invariant functionals containing compositions

The study of problems of the calculus of variations with compositions is a quite recent subject with origin in dynamical systems governed by chaotic maps. Available results are reduced to a generalized EulerLagrange equation that contains a new term involving inverse images of the minimizing trajectories. In this work we prove a generalization of the necessary optimality condition of DuBois-Reymond for variational problems with compositions. With the help of the new obtained condition, a Noether-type theorem is proved. An application of our main result is given to a problem appearing in the chaotic setting when one consider maps that are ergodic. Mathematics Subject Classification 2000: 49K05, 49J05.