Product Rule | Racquel Sanderson

Category Archives: Product Rule

January 11, 2025 · 9:56 am

Deriving the Product Rule for Differentiation

In my previous post we looked at the Chain Rule for Differentiation, this post is on the Product Rule. Differentiating a function in the form $y=f(x)\times g(x)$ .

For example, $y=(3x^3+2x-1)(x^4+2x^2)$

Remember differentiating from first prinicpals:

$f'(x)=\lim_{\limits h \to 0} \frac{f(x+h)-f(x)}{h}$

$y=f(x)g(x)$

$\frac{dy}{dx}=\lim_{\limits h\to 0}\frac{f(x+h)g(x+h)-f(x)g(x)}{h}}$

$\small{ \frac{dy}{dx}=\lim_{\limits h \to 0} \frac{f(x+h)g(x+h)-g(x+h)f(x)+g(x+h)f(x)-f(x)g(x)}{h}}$

By subtracting and then adding $g(x+h)f(x)$ we haven’t changed the limit, but it means we can do some factorising.

$\frac{dy}{dx}=\lim_{\limits h \to 0}\frac{g(x+h)(f(x+h)-f(x))+f(x)(g(x+h)-g(x))}{h}$

$\small{\frac{dy}{dx}=\lim_{\limits h \to 0}g(x+h)\lim_{\limits h \to 0}\frac{f(x+h)-f(x)}{h}+\lim_{\limits h \to 0}f(x)\lim_{\limits h \to 0}\frac{g(x+h)-g(x)}{h}}$