Friday, 2 October 2015

Help understanding a passage in Gelfand and Fomin's Calculus of Variations



Page 19 of Gelfand and Fomin's Calculus of Variations considers the Euler equation arising from functionals of the form baf(x,y)1+y2dy. Letting the integrand be F, they give the ddxFy term of the Euler equation as ddx[f(x,y)y1+y2]=fxy1+y2+fyy21+y2+fy(1+y2)3/2.



(Subscripts are Gelfand and Fomin's notation for partial derivatives.) This formula should stem from the product rule for derivatives, so to my understanding, the second and third terms should be f times the derivative of y1+y2; that is, they should be fddxy1+y2=fy21+y2+fy(1+y2)3/2.


So why do Gelfand and Fomin give fy (which is certainly not a typo) rather than f as the coefficient of y21+y2? There's no derivative with respect to y anywhere in the setup, so I don't see how any could arise in the answer.


Answer




Actually only the last term comes from
fddxy1+y2=(y1+y2yyy(1+y2)3/2)f=y(1+y2)3/2f.


The first two terms are from the total derivative of f, namely
dfdx=fx+fydydx=fx+yfy

by the multivariate chain rule.


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