Insight into the fractional calculus via a spreadsheet

David A. Miller and Stephen J. Sugden have written an article called Insight into the Fractional Calculus via a Spreadsheet. The article was published in the most recent issue of electronic journal Spreadsheets in Education. The article is freely available as a pdf download, but here is a copy of the 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<μ<1. Through the power of Excel we illustrate the continuous deformations dynamically through conditional formatting. Some applications are discussed and a connection made to mathematics education.