Named in honor of Gottfried Leibniz, a seventeenth century philosopher and mathematician, Leibniz notation is one of the two most popular ways to represent the derivative of a function. (The other representation being Lagrange notation.)
Suppose we have a variable that represents
, a function of the independent variable
:
The derivative of the function can be written using Leibniz notation as:
The first two forms can be rewritten in Lagrange notation like so:
And the third form in Lagrange notation is:
For higher derivatives, the Leibniz notation for the nth derivative is:
For example the second derivate of y or f(x) would be:
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