This monograph considers the analytical and geometrical questions emerging from the study of thin elastic films that exhibit residual stress at free equilibria.  It provides the comprehensive account, the details and background on the most recent results in the combined research perspective on the classical themes: in Differential Geometry – that of isometrically embedding a shape with a given metric in an ambient space of possibly different dimension, and in Calculus of Variations – that of minimizing non-convex energy functionals parametrized by a quantity in whose limit the...