Essential Concepts
- The chain rule for functions of more than one variable involves the partial derivatives with respect to all the independent variables.
- Tree diagrams are useful for deriving formulas for the chain rule for functions of more than one variable, where each independent variable also depends on other variables.
Key Equations
- Chain rule, one independent variable
- Chain rule, two independent variables
- Generalized chain rule
Glossary
- generalized chain rule
- the chain rule extended to functions of more than one independent variable, in which each independent variable may depend on one or more other variables
- intermediate variable
- given a composition of functions (e.g., ) the intermediate variables are the variables that are independent in the outer function but dependent on other variables as well; in the function the variables and are examples of intermediate variables
- tree diagram
- illustrates and derives formulas for the generalized chain rule, in which each independent variable is accounted for
Candela Citations
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- Calculus Volume 3. Authored by: Gilbert Strang, Edwin (Jed) Herman. Provided by: OpenStax. Located at: https://openstax.org/books/calculus-volume-3/pages/1-introduction. License: CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. License Terms: Access for free at https://openstax.org/books/calculus-volume-3/pages/1-introduction