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In mathematics, differential calculus is a subfield of calculus that studies the rates at which quantities change. [1] It is one of the two traditional divisions of calculus, the other being integral calculus —the study of the area beneath a curve.
Calculus is the mathematical study of continuous change, in the same way that geometry is the study of shape, and algebra is the study of generalizations of arithmetic operations. Originally called infinitesimal calculus or "the calculus of infinitesimals", it has two major branches, differential calculus and integral calculus.
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, ′ = ′ = (′) ′.
In calculus, the differential represents the principal part of the change in a function = with respect to changes in the independent variable. The differential is defined by = ′ (), where ′ is the derivative of f with respect to , and is an additional real variable (so that is a function of and ).
The linear map is called the (total) derivative or (total) differential of at . Other notations for the total derivative include D a f {\displaystyle D_{a}f} and D f ( a ) {\displaystyle Df(a)} . A function is ( totally ) differentiable if its total derivative exists at every point in its domain.
The resulting calculus, known as exterior calculus, allows for a natural, metric-independent generalization of Stokes' theorem, Gauss's theorem, and Green's theorem from vector calculus. If a differential k-form is thought of as measuring the flux through an infinitesimal k-parallelotope at each point of the manifold, then its exterior ...
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