Lecture 1, Week 4, Supplementary Notes: The Chain Rule (See §13.

5
in the book.)
Here is a correction for the answer to an example in the lecture notes given on pages 9-10. There
are serious errors in the answer, the main one is the assumption of “equality of mixed partials” when
nothing is known about the continuity of the partial derivatives.
Here is the correction (to be read with the lecture notes): Since z depends on u and u depends
on x and y, we have:

∂z dz ∂u
= · (1)
∂x du ∂x
just as in the lecture notes. Therefore

( !)
∂ 2z dz ∂ 2 u ∂u ∂ ∂z
2 = · 2+ · (2)
∂x du ∂x ∂x ∂x ∂u

again, just as in the lecture notes.

∂z is a function of u, and u is of course a function of x and y. The

But now, observe that z 0 = ∂u
relevant tree diagram now is:

z0
∂z 0
∂u

u
∂u ∂u
∂x ∂y
x y

[2 Marks] Henc
∂z with respect to x is given by:
Therefore the partial derivative of ∂u

! !
∂ ∂z d ∂z ∂u
= · (3)
∂x ∂u du ∂u ∂x
∂ 2z ∂u
= · (4)
∂u2 ∂x
Substituting (4) into (2) yields the desired result! [Note that since at the first level we have z as
a function of the single variable u, the symbols dz/du and ∂z/∂u mean thesame thing,  as it was
pointed out in the lecture notes. For the same reason, the symbols du d ∂z and ∂ ∂z stand
∂u ∂u ∂u
for the same thing.]