Welcome to Calculus.

I'm Professor Greist.

We're about to begin, lecture 16, on the
differentiation operator.
You may have come into this class
thinking of derivatives, in terms of
numbers, or slopes.
But we've broadened our perspective.
By thinking in more abstract and
conceptual terms.
We're going to culminate that process in
this lesson by thinking of
differentiation as an operator.
This more global perspective is going to
lead us not only to better comprehension,
but better computational abilities.
Some derivatives do not follow from the
basic rules that we've covered thus far.
For example, what's the derivative of 2
to the x?
If you don't recall, you may be tempted
to write x times 2 to the x minus 1.
That would be a mistake.
That is not the derivative.
What about some other functions?
Arcsin of x.
Do you recall the derivative of that?
What about x to the x, or x to the x to
the x, or more complicated functions
still?
These can be differentiated.
But we cannot use the basic rules that
we've learned thus far.
What we will use, is the idea that
differentiation is an operator and that
it acts on equations as well as
functions.
And more importantly it works well with
other operators, such as exponentiation
or integration, taking a limit or in
particular, the differentiation operator
works well with the natural algorithm
operator.
And that is the basis for that method
known as logarithmic differentiation.
Let's begin with a simple example.
Compute the derivative of e to the x.
Now, I know that you know what that
derivative is, but let us compute this
via logarithmic differentiation.
The key step will be to write either the
x as y, and then to simplify this
equation, we'll apply the natural
logarithm to both sides.
On the left, we obtain log of y.
On the right, log of e to the x, that is
Nx, and now we can differentiate this
equation.
On the left we'll obtain dy over y, on

the right we'll obtain dx.

And by manipulating these differentials,
we can easily compute dy dx to be y.
That is e to the x.
Now, this process is simple enough.
Let's step back and think of what you are
doing.
What we're really doing is taking our
initial equation and applying the natural
logarithm operator, and feeding the
results of that into the differentiation
operator.
That is what allows us to compute this
derivative.
Now you can compute other things
similarly.
For example, you could show that the
derivative of a to the x, where a is a
constant, is a to the x times log of a.
That's a fun exercise.
Odd, there's more to logarithmic
differentiation than just this.
In fact applying operators gives lots of
examples of things that are not quite
logarithmic differentiation, but follow a
similar pattern.
For example, let's look at the derivative
of log of x.
Now, we both know the answer to that.
But let's apply a similar methodology.
We'll let y be equal to log of x.
And now, how do we simplify this?
Well, we can apply the exponentiation
operator.
And then apply the differentiation
operator.
So, exponentiating this equation gives e
to the y equals e to the log of x.
That is x.
Now, assuming that we know how to
differentiate exponentials, we can apply
the differentiation operator.
And on the left we'll obtain E to the Y,
DY, on the right DX.
Manipulating differentials to solve gives
1 over X as the dirivative.
And so we see, that if you know the
derivative of log, you can compute the
derivative of the exponential.
If you know the derivative of the
exponential, you could likewise compute
the derivative of the log.
But that's not all we can do.
If asked to compute the derivative of
arcsin, how would we proceed?
What would the appropriate operator be?
It's pretty clear that sin is what we
want to use to feed into the derivative.
For example, if we let y be equal to
arcsin of x, and apply the sin operator

to both sides.
What do we get?
Well, on the left sin of y, on the right
because arcsin is the inverse of sin, we
obtain simply x.
And now because we know the derivative of
sin this is going to be pretty easy.
We got cosin of y dy equals dx.
And manipulating to obtain the dy dx.
We get 1 over the cosin of y.
And that is the secant of y.
Now, that is not exactly the form of the
answer.
That we want.
So we need to do a little bit of
trigometric manipulaation.
Given the right triangle with angle Y.
Since the sin of Y is equal to X, we
could assume that the opposite side
length is X, and the hypotenuse is one.
Meaning that the adjacent side length is
root 1 minus x squared.
This allows us to compute the secant as 1
over the square root of 1 minus x
squared, and that indeed is the
derivative of ARCSIN.
You can derive many other similar results
using this same principal.
You can compute the derivative of our
arch cosine, of arch cotangent.
You can even compute the derivatives of
the inverses to the hyperbolic trig
functions.
Arcsinh, arcosh, and arctanh, and it's
not only derivatives that one can
computer using these methods.
Operators are very versatile and helpful
across mathematics.
Let's do an example involving a limit.
Compute the limit as x goes to infinity
of quantity 1 plus A over x to the x
power.
Here, a is a constant, and note the
difficulty implicit here.
X is going to infinity, so the term
within the parenthesis is going to 1, but
you're raising this to higher and higher
powers.
You might be tempted to say, but this
limit is 1 to the infinity, which seems
like it ought to be 1, but that is not
applicable let's see what that limit is.
We are going to, as before let y be
defined as quantity 1 plus a over x to
the x power.
And before applying the limit operator.
We're going to apply something else in
this case, the natural logarithm, to pull
down that exponent of x.
On the left we obtain the log of y.

On the right, using what we know about

logarithms, we obtain x times the log of
one plus a over x.
Now we have something that we can work
with.
We're not differentiating.
We are taking a limit.
On the left is, close to something we
want to get, the limit of log of y.
On the right, we hit the limit as x goes
to infinity of x times log, 1 plus a over
x.
Now, how is this helping us at all?
well, the logarithm is in the form, log
of one plus something that becomes very
small, as X goes to infinity, so we can
use our Taylor expansion.
And rewrite that as a over x plus
something in big o of one over x squared.
That limit is going to be easy to
compute.
The leading order term is in fact a, and
that is the limit not of y but of log of
y.
And so exponentiating this equation, and
exchanging with the limit gives the
limit, x goes to infinity of e to the log
of y.
That is y is e to the a and that is
indeed what the limit of 1 plus a over x
to the x.
Is, let's step back for a moment.
Look at what we've done.
We had a challenging limit to compute.
A limit that we could not figure out
directly.
And so we took an indirect route, by
applying the natural logarithm operator.
Then take the element then applying the
exponentiation operator.
The wonderful thing is that we can
exchange these with limits, in this case,
and take the long way around to get to
where we want to go.
Let's look at another example.
This one seems intimidating.
What is the derivative of x to the x?
We're going to follow the same path as
before.
Let y be equal to x to the x.
How do we simplify that exponent?
Clearly, the natural logarithm is what
we're going to want to use.
When we apply the natural log, we obtain
on the left, log of y.
And on the right, x times log of x.
Now we can differentiate.
On the left we'll obtain dy, over y.
On the right, using the product rule, we
get x over x, plus log of x, dx.

That simplifies a little bit doing some

algebra gives us that dy, dx equals y
times quantity 1, plus log of x.
Replacing that y with x to the x shows
us.
But the derivative of x to the x, is x to
the x times quantity 1 plus log of x.
And that was easy enough to compute, but
let's think.
This function, x to the x, is super
exponential.
It's bigger than the exponential
function.
And when we compute it's derivative, it's
even larger than x to the x.
It is of order that big o, x to the x
times log of x.
Now if we think about what happens when
we differentiate functions and look at
their growth rates.
If I take something that is super
exponential in its growth rate and
differentiate it, I'm losing control over
the growth rate.
The growth rate is potentially much
larger, as we saw in the example.
Of x to the x, going to something that
was in big O of x to the x times log of
x.
The moral of this lesson is that no
matter how difficult the differentiation
problem looks, taking advantage of
operators is going to help you, with a
tricky computation.
And so ends Chapter two on
differentiation.
We've come a long way from thinking about
a derivative as a slope.
Indeed, we've considered derivatives from
the point of view of Taylor Series and
asymptotics.
We've considered differentials, and
ultimately, differentiation as an
operator.
We'll begin our next chapter, Chapter
three, by inverting that operator, and
looking at integration.