Saturday, 3 February 2018

calculus - Derivative over variable vs. partial derivative over variable




I was watching one of the Khan Academy videos on differential equations ("Exact Equations Intuition 1 (proofy)") and there's something that confused me.



In the video, they use both the derivative of a function ψ(x,y(x)) with respect to x,



ddxψ(x,y(x)),



as well as the partial derivative of the same function with respect to the same variable,



ψx




(I think) I understand what a partial derivative of a function is (you consider its other arguments constants and you essentially turn it into a derivative of a single variable function), but I don't understand what a non-partial derivative with respect to one variable means. How is it different from a partial derivative?


Answer



For the partial derivative ψx, you consider ψ as a function of two independent variables x and y, and see how that changes when you vary x while holding y constant. For dψdx, you are letting y be a function of x (that's what the y(x) means), so when x changes y also changes. The bivariate version of the chain rule says



ddxψ(x,y(x))=ψx(x,y(x))+dydx(x)ψy(x,y(x))


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