Cosmological Inflation, Microwave Background Anisotropies and Large Scale Structure of the Universe

Cosmological inflation provides the simplest and most promising mechanism for generating fluctuations for structure formation. Using powerful Hamilton-Jacobi methods, I will describe (1) how to compute density fluctuations and cosmic microwave anisotropies arising from inflation, and (2) improvements of the Zel’dovich approximation describing gravitational collapse. I compare these results with the latest cosmological observations.