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in reply to Re: I prefer
in thread I prefer

I've never seen a Hessian in the monastery. Although, if someone asked about identifying local maxima of functions with several variables, it's possible that the matrix

2f/∂x1∂x1 ... ∂2f/∂x1∂xn
... ... ... ... ∂2f/∂xn∂x1 ... ∂2f/∂xn∂xn
would get mentioned as a way to distinguish minima from maxima.