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Summary of the material to be added to this article:
Relation univariate multivariate: By fixing all variables but one one gets a univariate real function. If the function is continuous (resp. differentiable) the same is true for these univariate functions, but the converse is false: if all these univariate functions are continuous (resp. differentiable) this is not always true for the multivariate function.
Partial derivatives, differential and gradient. Partial derivatives of higher order.
Classes of functions: continuous, differentiable, Ck, C∞, analytic
Taylor expansion
Analytic prolongation in the analytic case, which makes that the domain of the function is almost always left implicit. Difficulty to make it explicit
Tangent hyperplane to the graph of the function, expressed in term of the gradient
Stationary or critical points, that are those where the gradient is zero (differentiable case)
Maxima and minima: At a local minimum, the gradient is zero and the Hessian matrix is positive semidefinite. A point at which the gradient is zero and the Hessian matrix is positive definite is a local minimum
Stationary points at which the Hessian matrix is not semidefinite, saddle points
Convexity: If the Hessian matrix is everywhere positive definite, the function is convex and the function has a unique minimum, and there are efficient algorithms to find it (fundamental in optimization)
List created by D.Lazard (talk) 09:49, 27 June 2013 (UTC)
Thanks for the creation of this article. This is a good thing for WP. However, this article is yet a stub, relatively to the amount of material that should be in it and is yet lacking. I'll use the template {{to do}} to summarize this lacking material. D.Lazard (talk) 04:24, 27 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
