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Calculus is of vital importance in physics: many physical processes are described by equations involving derivatives, called differential equations. Physics is particularly concerned with the way quantities change and develop over time, and the concept of the " time derivative " — the rate of change over time — is essential for the precise ...
The derivative f′(x) of a curve at a point is the slope (rise over run) of the line tangent to that curve at that point. Differential calculus is the study of the definition, properties, and applications of the derivative of a function. The process of finding the derivative is called differentiation. Given a function and a point in the domain ...
The calculus has been applied to stochastic partial differential equations as well. The calculus allows integration by parts with random variables; this operation is used in mathematical finance to compute the sensitivities of financial derivatives. The calculus has applications in, for example, stochastic filtering.
The application of hyperreal numbers to the foundations of calculus is called nonstandard analysis. This provides a way to define the basic concepts of calculus such as the derivative and integral in terms of infinitesimals, thereby giving a precise meaning to the in the Leibniz notation.
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, ′ = ′ = (′) ′.
The partial derivative generalizes the notion of the derivative to higher dimensions. A partial derivative of a multivariable function is a derivative with respect to one variable with all other variables held constant. [1]: 26ff A partial derivative may be thought of as the directional derivative of the function along a coordinate axis.
The calculus of variations (or variational calculus) is a field of mathematical analysis that uses variations, which are small changes in functions and functionals, to find maxima and minima of functionals: mappings from a set of functions to the real numbers.
In calculus, a branch of mathematics, the third derivative or third-order derivative is the rate at which the second derivative, or the rate of change of the rate of change, is changing. The third derivative of a function y = f ( x ) {\displaystyle y=f(x)} can be denoted by