- #1
TheCanadian
- 367
- 13
I was looking over a derivation to find the laplacian from cartesian to cylindrical and spherical coordinates here: http://skisickness.com/2009/11/20/
Everything seems fine, but there is an instance (I have attached a screenshot) where implicit differentiation is done to find $$ \frac {\partial \phi}{\partial x} $$ by finding $$ \frac {d\phi}{dx} $$ implicitly and then equating this to $$ \frac {\partial \phi}{\partial x} $$ It seems like they are two separate equations. In this instance, x was independent of y, but in a future scenario, if x and y were dependent (e.g. y = kx), then the implicit differentiation would give a different result, right? In that case, would this approach work to still give $$ \frac {d\phi}{dx} = \frac {\partial \phi}{\partial x} {\text ?}$$
I understand the strategy based on the above equation (in the link) where they are trying to find each respective partial derivative to go from cartesian to cylindrical coordinates, but equating the full derivative to the partial derivative seems a little off. It looks like it works in this particular case because x and y are independent, but if they were dependent, would this approach work?
Everything seems fine, but there is an instance (I have attached a screenshot) where implicit differentiation is done to find $$ \frac {\partial \phi}{\partial x} $$ by finding $$ \frac {d\phi}{dx} $$ implicitly and then equating this to $$ \frac {\partial \phi}{\partial x} $$ It seems like they are two separate equations. In this instance, x was independent of y, but in a future scenario, if x and y were dependent (e.g. y = kx), then the implicit differentiation would give a different result, right? In that case, would this approach work to still give $$ \frac {d\phi}{dx} = \frac {\partial \phi}{\partial x} {\text ?}$$
I understand the strategy based on the above equation (in the link) where they are trying to find each respective partial derivative to go from cartesian to cylindrical coordinates, but equating the full derivative to the partial derivative seems a little off. It looks like it works in this particular case because x and y are independent, but if they were dependent, would this approach work?