This note surveys -- by means of 25 examples -- the concept of varifold, as generalised submanifold, with emphasis on integral varifolds with mean curvature, while keeping prerequisites to a minimum. Integral varifolds are the natural language for studying the variational theory of the area integrand if one considers, for instance, existence or regularity of stationary (or, stable) surfaces of dimension at least three, or the limiting behaviour of sequences of smooth submanifolds under area and mean curvature bounds. 查看全文>>