Gradient of a dot product

Question

The wikipedia formula for the gradient of a dot product is given as

$$\nabla(a\cdot b) = (a\cdot\nabla)b +(b\cdot \nabla)a + a\times(\nabla\times b)+ b\times (\nabla \times a)$$

However, I also found the formula $$\nabla(a\cdot b) = (\nabla a)\cdot b + (\nabla b)\cdot a $$

So... what is going on here? The second formula seems much easier. Are these equivalent?

Answer 1

They are basically the same. For the first identity, you could refer to my proof using Levi-Civita notation here. And for the second, you should know that $\nabla a=\left(\frac{\partial a_j}{\partial x_i}\right)=\left(\frac{\partial a_i}{\partial x_j}\right)^T$ is a matrix and dot product is exactly matrix multiplication. So the proof is $$(\nabla a)\cdot b+(\nabla b)\cdot a=\left(\frac{\partial a_j}{\partial x_i}b_j+\frac{\partial b_j}{\partial x_i}a_j\right)e_i=\frac{\partial(a_jb_j)}{\partial x_i}e_i=\nabla(a\cdot b)$$

Answer 2

Let us use the following index and shorthand notation. $u_{,i}=\displaystyle{\frac{\partial u}{\partial x_i}}$ . $x_1=x ,x_2=y, x_3=z$. Einstein notation. Repeated index means summation over it, and $[.]_i$ the i-th compnent of whatever is inside the square brackets $[]$.

Then \begin{eqnarray} [\nabla (\mathbf{a} \cdot \mathbf{b})]_i = (a_j b_j)_{,i} = a_{j,i}b_j + a_j b_{j,i}. \end{eqnarray}

That is all, I do not see anything more complicated than this. The two sums are matrix vector multiplications. Note that $a_{j,i} b_j$ means the matrix $\partial a_j/\partial x_i$ times the vector $b_j$. You can write this in two different forms \begin{eqnarray} (\nabla \mathbf{a}) \cdot \mathbf{b}= (\mathbf{b} \cdot \nabla) \mathbf{a} = \left ( \begin{array}{c} \displaystyle{b_1 \frac{\partial a_1}{\partial x} + b_2 \frac{\partial a_1}{\partial y} + b_ 3 \frac{\partial a_1}{\partial z}} \\ \\ \displaystyle{b_1 \frac{\partial a_2}{\partial x} + b_2 \frac{\partial a_2}{\partial y} + b_3 \frac{\partial a_2}{\partial z}} \\ \\ \displaystyle{b_1 \frac{\partial a_3}{\partial x} + b_2 \frac{\partial a_3}{\partial y} + b_3 \frac{\partial a_3}{\partial z}} \end{array} \right ) \end{eqnarray} Where the symbol $\nabla \mathbf{a}$ means a matrix. The matrix whose rows are gradients of the components $a_1,a_2,a_3$ respectively. To be more precise the vector $\mathbf{b}$ on the left side is a column vector and that on the center is a row vector, so we can call the vector on the center instead $\mathbf{b}^T$ or transposed of the column vector $\mathbf{b}$, the whole expression in the center should be transposed as well...but this is a minor detail. I do not see any difference between these two things. So we can say \begin{eqnarray} \nabla (\mathbf{a} \cdot \mathbf{b}) = (\nabla \mathbf{a}) \cdot \mathbf{b} + \mathbf{a} \cdot \nabla \mathbf{b} = (\mathbf{a} \cdot \nabla) \mathbf{b} + (\mathbf{b} \cdot \nabla) \mathbf{a}. \end{eqnarray}

I do not see where the curl $(\nabla \times)$ enter in this analysis. Can someone point out an example where if we do not add the curl terms we get different values on the left and on the right?

Answer 3

Since there are not many signs that one may easily use in mathematical notations, many of these symbols are overloaded. In particular, the dot "$\cdot$" is used in the first formula to denote the scalar product of two vector fields in $\mathbb R^3$ called $a$ and $b$, while in the second formula it denotes the usual product of the functions $a$ and $b$. This means that both formulae are valid, but each one is so only in its proper context.

(It is scary to see that the answers and comments that were wrong collected the most votes!)