Insight into the Fractional Calculus via a Spreadsheet

Abstract

Many students of calculus are not aware that the calculus they have learned is a special case (integer order) of fractional calculus. Fractional calculus is the study of arbitrary order derivatives and integrals and their applications. The article begins by stating a naive question from a student in a paper by Larson (1974) and establishes, for polynomials and exponential functions, that they can be deformed into their derivative using the μ-th order fractional derivatives for 0 2009 HERDC submission. FoR code: 0103

Keywords

• Spreadsheet
• fractional calculus
• mathematics education