  We give a quick tour through many of the classical results in the field of
minimal submanifolds, starting at the definition. The field of minimal
submanifolds remains extremely active and has very recently seen major
developments that have solved many longstanding open problems and conjectures;
for more on this, see the expanded version of this survey as well as recent
surveys of Meeks and Perez, Perez, and Rosenberg.
