The ordinary difference quotient is the simplest formula for
univariate numerical differentiation. Polynomial interpolation is
one of the basic theories for those simple formulas such as forward
difference $$f'(x)\approx \frac{f(x+h)-f(x)}{h},$$ backward
difference $$f'(x)\approx \frac{f(x)-f(x-h)}{h},$$ and centered
difference $$f'(x)\approx \frac{f(x+h)-f(x-h)}{2h}.$$ We use the
derivative of an interpolation polynomial to approximate the
derivative of $f(x)$, so that we can obtain these formulas. In the
bivariate case, using the Lagrange interpolation polynomial on the
grid-points, for example, the nine sample points are
$$(x_0-h_1,y_0+h_2) , (x_0,y_0+h_2), (x_0+h_1,y_0+h_2)$$
$$(x_0-h_1,y_0) , (x_0,y_0), (x_0+h_1,y_0)$$
$$(x_0-h_1,y_0-h_2) , (x_0,y_0-h_2), (x_0+h_1,y_0-h_2)$$
we can obtain the numerical differentiation formulas
\begin{eqnarray*}
% \nonumber to remove numbering (before each equation)
\frac{\partial}{\partial x}f(x_0,y_0) &=& \frac{f(x_0+h_1,y_0)-f(x_0-h_1,y_0)}{2h_1}, \\
\frac{\partial}{\partial y}f(x_0,y_0) &=&
\frac{f(x_0,y_0+h_2)-f(x_0,y_0-h_2)}{2h_2}.
\end{eqnarray*}
It is very hard to obtain the numerical differentiation formulas
when the points are not grid shape, such as the Delaunay
triangulation. In this paper, based on multivariate polynomial
interpolation, we give a numerical differentiation algorithm to
compute the differential values of multivariate functions at a
single point directly.