I am in confidence with Taylor expansion of function $f\colon R \to R$, but I when my professor started to use higher order derivatives and multivariate Taylor expansion of $f\colon R^n \to R$ and $f\colon R^n \to R^m$ I felt lost.
Can somean explain to me from scratch multivariate Taylor?
In particular I don't understand the notation
$$
f(x+h) = \sum_{k=0}^p \frac{1}{k!} f^{(k)}(x)[h,…,h] + O(h^{p+1})
$$
Why we need the k-linear form $ \frac{1}{k!} f^{(k)}(x)[h,…,h]$? This k-linear form is the derivative or the derivative is only $f^{(k)}(x)$?
I'm quite lost. Thank you.
Best Answer
One can think about Taylor's theorem in calculus as applying in the following cases:
All of these can be derived & proven based on nothing more than integration by parts (the last one needs to be developed in a banach space & the third one is more commonly reduced to the first one which is just a shorthand for re-proving it via integration by parts) if you set things up correctly (as is done in Lang's Undergraduate, Real & Functional Analysis books) & so your main obstacle here is formalism - this is no small obstacle as we'll see below.
Now I'm not sure if your expression for Taylor's formula is map 3 or map 4, one would think it is map 3 since you used the word "linear form" which is standard parlance for maps from vector spaces into a field but you did ask about maps of the form $f : \mathbb{R}^n \rightarrow \mathbb{R}^m$ - are you sure you are differentiating these kinds of maps because they add a whole world of complexity compared to the first 3?
If you're asking about maps of the form in 3 then some intuition is given in this video & some examples & a proof are given in this video. After these you should have enough of a grasp of what's going on & if you focus on developing the formalism properly you should be able to prove it yourself in more general spaces.
If you're actually asking about map 4 then you may be used to the definition of the derivative of the last map as $f : \mathbb{R}^n \rightarrow \mathbb{R}^m$ as something like $\mathcal{f'} : \mathbb{R}^n \rightarrow \mathcal{L}(\mathbb{R}^n,\mathbb{R}^m)$ satisfying all the conditions a differentiable map does, well it's second derivative is defined similarly using a map of the form $f'': \mathbb{R}^n \rightarrow \mathcal{L}(\mathbb{R}^n,\mathcal{L}(\mathbb{R}^n,\mathbb{R}^m))$ & so on, however you see no such entity as a "k-linear form" in any of this & that's because there is a theorem which allows one to think of maps like the second derivative above in terms of multilinear maps & so one can re-cast the theory using multilinear maps which eases the development & allows for nice proofs etc... but without this being explained it might appear odd to randomly start pulling out multilinear maps.
In any case the derivative is a linear map by definition & so that is why you're coming across the word linear, but since you didn't put subscripts on the $[h,...,h]$ I'm not sure how deep I can go, because I see two possibilities here so if the above isn't enough of an explanation as it stands just let me know.