Maxwell’s Relations (Part 2)

The Maxwell relations are some very general identities about the partial derivatives of functions of several variables. You don’t need to understand anything about thermodyamics to understand them, but they’re used a lot in that subject, so discussions of them tend to use notation from that subject.

Last time I went through a standard way to derive these relations for a function of two variables. Now I want to give a better derivation, which I found here:

• David J. Ritchie, A simple method fo...