In this talk, we explore the relationship between Symplecticity and the
preservation of quadratic invariants. Symplectic Runge-Kutta methods,
the bread and butter of numerical geometric integration, are exactly
the ones that preserve all quadratic first integrals of a system. But
when we expand our focus to larger classes of methods, we will find a
more nuanced connection. It is also known that for symplectic RK
methods, the action of discretization commutes with forming variational
equations, and we will discuss the expansion of this result to a larger
class of methods.