ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on demonstrating symbolic differentiation with R using the Deriv package. In general, symbolic differentiation with R doesn’t rival Mathematica, but it is certainly sufficient for the needs of calculus and other undergraduate courses. The chapter begins with a quick look at numeric differentiation using the numDeriv package. It discusses the use of the rootSolve package to find max, min, and inflection points and create a graph with those identified points. The chapter identifies the inflection points of a normal density curve and also demonstrates how to shade the tails of the curve by using the function polygon.
