differentiation of cross products
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg16419] differentiation of cross products
- From: "Issac Trotts" <trotts at ucdavis.edu>
- Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 02:21:37 -0500
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
Can anyone tell me how to differentiate the cross product of two vector-valued functions in Mathematica? The input D[Cross[g[t],h[t]],t] results in the output h'[t] Cross^(0,1)[g[t], h[t]] + g'[t] Cross^(1,0)[g[t], h[t]] which is not correct. The correct answer would be Cross[g'[t], h[t]] + Cross[g[t], h'[t]] I also tried (Cross[g[#],h[#]]&)' which gave me the following incorrect output: Cross^(1,0)[g[#1], h[#1]] g'[#1] + Cross^(0,1)[g[#1], h[#1]] h'[#1] & Please tell me if you know of a good way to deal with this problem. Thanks, Issac Trotts P.S.: Please send your response to trotts at ucdavis.edu .