Directional Derivatives | What's the slope in any direction?

A directional derivative gives the slope in any particular direction, similar to partial derivatives which give the slope just in the x or y directions. We formally define directional derivatives by modifying the familiar limit definition of the derivative for when you move along some vector in the input space. Then we see a very nice feature that we can use the gradient vector grad(f) to make computing directional derivatives easy. If you have the gradient, you can get the directional derivative in the u direction with one easy dot product.

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This video was created by Dr. Trefor Bazett. I'm an Assistant Teaching Professor at the University of Victoria.

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