Book excerpt: The aim of this book is to study harmonic maps, minimal and parallel mean curvature immersions in the presence of symmetry. In several instances, the latter permits reduction of the original elliptic variational problem to the qualitative study of certain ordinary differential equations: the authors' primary objective is to provide representative examples to illustrate these reduction methods and their associated analysis with geometric and topological applications. The material covered by the book displays a solid interplay involving geometry, analysis and topology: in particular, it includes a basic presentation of 1-cohomogeneous equivariant differential geometry and of the theory of harmonic maps between spheres.