  The classical approach to visualizing a flow, in terms of its streamlines, motivates a topological/soft-analytic argument for constrained variational equations. In its full generality, that argument provides an explicit formula for completely integrable solutions to a broad class of n-dimensional quasilinear exterior systems. In particular, it yields explicit solutions for extremal surfaces in Minkowski space and for Born--Infeld models. 
Constructing completely integrable fields by a generalized-streamlines   method