With these definitions we can now compute the derivative of the cost function in terms of the weights.
Let us specialize to the output layer \( l=L \). Our cost function is $$ {\cal C}(\hat{W^L}) = \frac{1}{2}\sum_{i=1}^n\left(y_i - t_i\right)^2=\frac{1}{2}\sum_{i=1}^n\left(a_i^L - t_i\right)^2, $$ The derivative of this function with respect to the weights is $$ \frac{\partial{\cal C}(\hat{W^L})}{\partial w_{jk}^L} = \left(a_j^L - t_j\right)\frac{\partial a_j^L}{\partial w_{jk}^{L}}, $$ The last partial derivative can easily be computed and reads (by applying the chain rule) $$ \frac{\partial a_j^L}{\partial w_{jk}^{L}} = \frac{\partial a_j^L}{\partial z_{j}^{L}}\frac{\partial z_j^L}{\partial w_{jk}^{L}}=a_j^L(1-a_j^L)a_k^{L-1}, $$