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In calculus, the chain rule is a formula that expresses the derivative of the composition of two differentiable functions f and g in terms of the derivatives of f and g.More precisely, if = is the function such that () = (()) for every x, then the chain rule is, in Lagrange's notation, ′ = ′ (()) ′ (). or, equivalently, ′ = ′ = (′) ′.
That is, df is the unique 1-form such that for every smooth vector field X, df (X) = d X f , where d X f is the directional derivative of f in the direction of X. The exterior product of differential forms (denoted with the same symbol ∧) is defined as their pointwise exterior product.
The logarithmic derivative is another way of stating the rule for differentiating the logarithm of a function (using the chain rule): () ′ = ′, wherever is positive. Logarithmic differentiation is a technique which uses logarithms and its differentiation rules to simplify certain expressions before actually applying the derivative.
The derivative of the function given by () = + + is ′ = + () () + = + (). Here the second term was computed using the chain rule and the third term using the product rule. The known derivatives of the elementary functions , , (), (), and =, as well as the constant , were also used.
if it is zero, then x could be a local minimum, a local maximum, or neither. (For example, f(x) = x 3 has a critical point at x = 0, but it has neither a maximum nor a minimum there, whereas f(x) = ± x 4 has a critical point at x = 0 and a minimum and a maximum, respectively, there.) This is called the second derivative test.
The partial derivative of f with respect to x does not give the true rate of change of f with respect to changing x because changing x necessarily changes y. However, the chain rule for the total derivative takes such dependencies into account. Write () = (, ()). Then, the chain rule says
Of course, the Jacobian matrix of the composition g ° f is a product of corresponding Jacobian matrices: J x (g ° f) =J ƒ(x) (g)J x (ƒ). This is a higher-dimensional statement of the chain rule. For real valued functions from R n to R (scalar fields), the Fréchet derivative corresponds to a vector field called the total derivative.
If f is a function, then its derivative evaluated at x is written ′ (). It first appeared in print in 1749. [3] Higher derivatives are indicated using additional prime marks, as in ″ for the second derivative and ‴ for the third derivative. The use of repeated prime marks eventually becomes unwieldy.