Stationary points under an increasing outer function

ID: stationary-points-under-an-increasing-outer-function

Suppose is differentiable and on its range. The multivariable chain rule shows that has exactly the same stationary points as . Since is strictly increasing, the type of every local maximum, local minimum, and saddle point is preserved. If both functions are twice differentiable, then at a stationary point
so the Hessian matrix signature is unchanged. The hypothesis matters for the converse about stationary points: a strictly increasing function such as can have a zero derivative and create new stationary points in a composition.

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