TITLE: Confused by how to derive the derivative of $f(\boldsymbol{x})=g(\boldsymbol{y})$
QUESTION [5 upvotes]: I was watching an online tutorial and saw this derivation.

It seems the the author took the derivative with respect to y on left side and to x on right side. I thought dx should always be in the denominator and should on both side of the equation. Is it partial derivative? Or maybe my misunderstanding of the notation? 
Could anyone explain how this works? FYI the link of the tutorial is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXBFKKh54Es&list=PLwJRxp3blEvZyQBTTOMFRP_TDaSdly3gU&index=98, the differentials was taken at around 2'20"
Much appreciated! Happy New Year.

REPLY [2 votes]: From your other question I can say that it's a misunderstanding of differentiation and what is happening here. One simple way to understand it is as follows:
Take differentiable functions $x,y$ with open domain $D$ such that $\ln(y(t)) = a + b \ln(x(t))$ for any $t \in D$.
Then differentiating gives $\frac{y'(t)}{y(t)} = b \frac{x'(t)}{x(t)}$ for any $t \in D$.
If you rewrite this in Leibniz's suggestive notation you get:
$\frac{dy(t)}{y(t)\ dt} = b \frac{dx(t)}{x(t)\ dt}$
And if you treat $dt$ as a sufficiently small non-zero quantity and multiply both sides by it, you get:
$\frac{dy(t)}{y(t)} = b \frac{dx(t)}{x(t)}$
Note that this equation must be used with the understanding that the differentials are taken in the context of a small change in $t$, since we have now omitted $dt$.
Note that this is not equivalent to a small change in $x(t),y(t)$! For example if $x(t) = \sin(t)$ and $y(t) = \sin(2t)$ for any $t \in \mathbb{R}$, the curve $(x,y)$ intersects itself at $(0,0)$ and has two gradients there, one when $t = 0$ and the other when $t = \pi$.
And historically we have used bare variables to represent changing quantities so if we drop the parameter $t$ we get:
$\frac{dy}{y} = b \frac{dx}{x}$.
Note that this now makes no sense unless both differentials are taken in the same context, which now means that not only are they taken with respect to a small change in $t$ (which is now missing from the equation), we have to use this equation with the understanding that the values of $x,y$ are tied to each other, represented earlier on explicitly by the parameter $t$. In many cases in physics, however, $t$ is $x$ itself, which is expressed by the mathematically not quite right "$y$ is a function of $x$".