I’m working through Special Relativity by V. Faraoni, and am puzzled by something in his chapters on tensors. He tells us that the partial derivative of a tensor field, e.g. $T_{\alpha, \gamma}$, is not a tensor, because
\begin{align*}\frac{\partial T_{\alpha'}}{\partial x^{\gamma'}} &= \frac{\partial x^{\delta}}{\partial x^{\gamma'}}\frac{\partial}{\partial x^{\delta}}\left[\frac{\partial x^{\nu}}{\partial x^{\alpha'}}T_{\nu}\right]\\ &= \frac{\partial x^\delta}{\partial x^{\gamma'}}\left[\frac{\partial}{\partial x^{\delta}}\left(\frac{\partial x^{\nu}}{\partial x^{\alpha'}}\right)\right]T_{\nu} + \frac{\partial x^{\delta}}{\partial x^{\gamma'}}\frac{\partial x^{\nu}}{\partial x^{\alpha'}}\frac{\partial T_{\nu}}{\partial x^{\delta}}, \end{align*}
and generally $\frac{\partial^2 x^{\nu}}{\partial x^{\delta}\partial x^{\alpha'}}\ne 0$ (I’ve simplified his more general mixed-tensor version here). That is perfectly fine by me.
But on the next page he sets an example of the preceding few sections, using fluid mechanics’ velocity vector field, $v(\mathbf{x},t)$, and from this, states that the components
$$v_{ij} = \frac{\partial v_i}{\partial x^j}$$
form a 2-tensor. He gives no justification for this in terms of the above warning.
Am I misunderstanding the definition of $v_{ij}$ here—is it not equivalent to $v_{i,j}$? Or is it the case for the fluid velocity field that the mixed derivatives vanish? My background in fluid mechanics is sketchy at best.
I’m also unsure why he’s using covariant indices for the velocity vector field; might that just be typographical error?
