How to model a simple energy minimization using Euler-Lagrange equations

Question

Suppose I have a randomly-generated set of numbers, where each number is indexed by $x$. This is equivalent to a 1-D scalar field, let's call that $u(x)$.

Let's say my objective is to minimize the distance between each subsequent pair of scalars, which may be expressed as minimizing the following energy functional:

$$E[u(x)] = \sum_{x}\left(\frac{du(x)}{dx}\right)^2$$

Thanks to comment/clarification by @BrianBorchers, setting $u(x)=0$ would ultimately achieve an unconstrained minimum. Thus, I introduce the following constraints: $u(x)$ is defined on $[a,b]$, so that $u(a)$ and $u(b)$ are fixed scalar values.

The first (or second) derivatives for the scalar field $u(x)$ can be approximated easily by taking finite differences. I would like to simply use gradient descent to get the scalar field u to converge to the desired state. Hence I need an update step for $u(x)$, something like:

$$u^{k+1} = u^{k} - \alpha\left(\frac{dE[u(x)]}{du(x)}\right)$$, where $\alpha$ is a constant update step/rate.

I'm doing this to gain thorough understanding of a research article which uses similar, albeit more complex energy functions expressed in terms of a vector field. The authors state that the update step, i.e. the equivalent of the term $\frac{dE[u(x)]}{du(x)}$ above is derived using the Euler-Lagrange equations. Links to the article and the supplementary material are given below.

I looked at numerous tutorials and some books, and if I understand correctly, the Euler-Lagrange equation for the said energy $E[u(x)]$ would be:

$$-\frac{d}{dx}E_{u'}[u(x)] + E_{u}[u(x)] = 0$$ or, using Lagrange's notation for derivatives, $$-\frac{d}{dx}\left(\frac{dE[u(x)]}{d\frac{du(x)}{dx}}\right) + \frac{dE[u(x)]}{du(x)} = 0$$

1. Is the above formulation of the Euler-Lagrange equation correct?
2. The Euler-Lagrange equation looks like it would directly yield a stationary point in the energy functional. I suppose, I cannot do that directly for some reason. How exactly does the Euler-Lagrange equation relate to the update step I should take in my gradient descent above?
3. How exactly do I formulate the update step as a function of first and second derivatives of $u(x)$ w.r.t. $x$?

The original research article (see sec 4.2) and supplementary material (see sec 2.3) :

• Slavcheva, Miroslava, Maximilian Baust, Daniel Cremers, and Slobodan Ilic. "KillingFusion: Non-rigid 3D Reconstruction without Correspondences." In IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), vol. 3, no. 4, p. 7. 2017.
• Supplementary Material

Answer 1

I'm answering on behalf of Nitin Sanket, and he deserves full credit for the explanation.

1) The Euler-Lagrange equation is essentially correct. Normally, with the exception of $-\frac{d}{dx}$ in the very beginning, we would have partial derivatives, but here the regular derivative works since $E$ is a function only in $u(x)$. There is a slight problem with the notation here, same as in the paper: the total energy needs to be expressed separately from the function inside the integral (in this case, sum). This way, it is clear that the update step at each point x of the scalar field does not involve the sum.

2) and 3) The update step $\frac{dE[u(x)]}{du(x)}$ can be obtained by moving the first term of the given Euler-Lagrange equation to the right-hand side, thereby solving for the step. Since first- and second-order derivatives are easy to compute on the scalar field, we can easily obtain the update at each step.

The rest of the Killing regularizer from the cited article is just a generalization of the above method from a Lagrangian of a scalar field in one dimension to a Lagrangian of a vector field in three dimensions, which can be easily derived following the Wikipedia entry on the subject.