affine function | Blame It On The Analyst

Higher Dimensions

I want to extend the treatment to we just went through to higher dimensions. In my view, this provides a very nice way of thinking about why the generalisation of the derivative to higher dimensions is what it is. It has certainly taken me a while to appreciate the definition of the derivative of a a function of many variables and I am attempting to share some of my thoughts.

In the last post we thought about graphs of functions and tangent-lines. Now, the graph of a function is intially something 0ne thinks of a picture of that function. In my opinion, there is a sense in which one ought to continue to do so. It’s just that now, we’ll be thinking about $\mathbb{R}^m$ -valued functions f defined on an open subset U of $\mathbb{R}^n$ . Recall that the graph of f is the set of points $(x, y)$ in $U \times \mathbb{R}^m$ such that f(x) = y.