Past exam of the year 1 of the computer science course of the University of Oxford / 2019 / Discrete mathematics, continuous mathematics, and probability resit / 6 / a / Solution

For a differentiable scalar function of $n$ real variables, its derivative is the linear mapwhere the column gradient is $\nabla f=(\partial f/\partial x_1,\dots ,\partial f/\partial x_n{)}^T$. Its Hessian is the $n\times n$ matrix $H_f=({\partial }^{2}f/\partial x_i\partial x_j{)}_{i,j}$. For a $C^2$ function, equality of mixed partial derivatives makes this matrix symmetric.