Loading [MathJax]/jax/output/HTML-CSS/jax.js

Search This Blog

Continuous Differentiability

If we have a single-variable function f:RR it is quite clear what it means when we say f is Ck (or of class Ck), kZ,k0

  • when k1 that means all the derivatives of f up to the k-th one exist, and in addition to that f(k) is continuous 
  • when k=0 that means simply that f is continuous


Now suppose we have the multi-variable function f:RmR 

Here mN and m2.


In that case what does it mean when we say that f is of class Ck, kZ,k0

I met this concept on page 145 of the Vector Calculus book by Baxandall and Liebeck, and I realized that this concept is not quite clear to me. So I did some research on that, and it turned out this concept pertains to the partial derivatives of f.


The best definition that I found is the one given here.


So in the multi-variable case, it turns out that

  • when we say f is of class Ck, kN, that means that all the partial derivatives of f of order sk exist and are continuous
  • when we say f is of class C or C0, that means just that f is continuous

Finally, when the function f is of class C1, it is also called continuously differentiable.


No comments:

Post a Comment