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The differential was first introduced via an intuitive or heuristic definition by Isaac Newton and furthered by Gottfried Leibniz, who thought of the differential dy as an infinitely small (or infinitesimal) change in the value y of the function, corresponding to an infinitely small change dx in the function's argument x.
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646–1716), German philosopher, mathematician, and namesake of this widely used mathematical notation in calculus.. In calculus, Leibniz's notation, named in honor of the 17th-century German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, uses the symbols dx and dy to represent infinitely small (or infinitesimal) increments of x and y, respectively ...
Later authors have assigned them other meanings, such as infinitesimals in non-standard analysis, or exterior derivatives. Commonly, dx is left undefined or equated with , while dy is assigned a meaning in terms of dx, via the equation =, which may also be written, e.g.
In Leibniz's notation, if x is a variable quantity, then dx denotes an infinitesimal change in the variable x. Thus, if y is a function of x, then the derivative of y with respect to x is often denoted dy/dx, which would otherwise be denoted (in the notation of Newton or Lagrange) ẏ or y ′.
In mathematics, the derivative is a fundamental tool that quantifies the sensitivity to change of a function's output with respect to its input. The derivative of a function of a single variable at a chosen input value, when it exists, is the slope of the tangent line to the graph of the function at that point.
Derivatives are frequently used to find the maxima and minima of a function. Equations involving derivatives are called differential equations and are fundamental in describing natural phenomena . Derivatives and their generalizations appear in many fields of mathematics, such as complex analysis , functional analysis , differential geometry ...
In calculus, the quotient rule is a method of finding the derivative of a function that is the ratio of two differentiable functions. Let () = (), where both f and g are differentiable and () The quotient rule states that the derivative of h(x) is
In mathematics, matrix calculus is a specialized notation for doing multivariable calculus, especially over spaces of matrices.It collects the various partial derivatives of a single function with respect to many variables, and/or of a multivariate function with respect to a single variable, into vectors and matrices that can be treated as single entities.