Put . The trigonometric identities give . Expanding cosine at zero gives
The linear and cubic terms vanish, so these are the first two nonzero Taylor series terms.
The characteristic polynomial is . Solving each eigenvalue equation gives the eigenvalues and eigenvectors
For unit-length representatives divide each displayed direction by . The two eigendirections are orthogonal, consistently with the matrix being a symmetric matrix.
The gradient is , with value at the point. Normalize the direction to a unit vector: . The directional derivative is therefore

There are unlisted articles, also show them or only show them.