proof of chain rule (several variables)
We first consider the case i.e. where is a neighbourhood of a point and is defined on a neighbourhood of such that . We suppose that both is differentiable at the point and is differentiable in . We want to compute the derivative of the compoundfunction at .
By the definition of derivative (using Landau notation) we have
Choose any such that and set to obtain
Letting the first term of the sum converges to hencewe want to prove that the second term converges to .Indeed we have
By the definition of the first fraction tends to , whilethe second fraction tends to the absolute value of . Thus the producttends to , as needed.
Consider now the general case .Given we are going to compute the directional derivative
where is a function of a single variable . Thuswe fall back to the previous case and we find that
In particular when is the -th coordinate vector, we find
which can be compactly written