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Use the Einstein summation convention and the contraction of two Levi-Civita symbols. For the first cross product term,The last term cancels $(F\cdot \nabla )G_i$. Interchanging $F,G$ gives the analogous cancellation with $(G\cdot \nabla )F_i$. The surviving terms are $F_j{\partial }_i{G}_j+G_j{\partial }_i{F}_j={\partial }_i(F_j{G}_j)$ by the product rule. This proves the dot-product gradient identityThe proof only requires continuously differentiable vector fields; neither field needs to be an irrotational vector field.