A closely related concept to the derivative of a function is its differential. When and are real variables, the derivative of at is the slope of the tangent line to the graph of at . Because the source and target of are one-dimensional, the derivative of is a real number. If and are vectors, then the best linear approximation to the graph of depends on how changes in several directions at once. Taking the best linear approximation in a single direction determines a partial derivative, which is usually denoted . The linearization of in all directions at once is called the total derivative.