TITLE: Almgren's mimeographed lectures notes on varifolds
QUESTION [7 upvotes]: I am trying to get some insights for the combinatorial argument of Pitts (in his PhD thesis 'Existence and regularity of minimal surfaces in Riemannian manifolds', Princeton University Press, 1981) to prove the existence of suitable class of varifolds in the so-called Almgren-Pitts theory. Pitts quotes the reference 'The theory of varifolds' (Almgren, mimeographed notes, Princeton, 1965) as the origin of his argument. 
Unfortunately, I have no idea where to find this text, so any help would be very appreciated.

REPLY [15 votes]: I just bumped into your post after doing some google search to find a bibtex entry for Almgren's notes. 
I have a copy of them: I could copy it and send it to you (or maybe scan it and share it via dropbox). However before getting to the combinatorial arguments you would have to go through quite a lot of material. I am writing a paper with a PhD student where we modify Pitts' theory for the case of surfaces with boundaries and we have a separate section with the relevant combinatorial argument, which is probably easier to understand. If you are interested please contact me by email. My name is Camillo De Lellis and I work at the math department of the University of Zuerich: you find my email address in my web page there