[R-SIG-Finance] Symbolic computation in R

[Trevor Davis]

Ryacas is the way to go if you need to stay in R, however R is 
relatively a much stronger numeric programming environment than symbolic 
programming environment.  For your symbolic math needs you might also 
want to check out SAGE which brings together many free open-source 
mathematics programs.  I find it more natural to do symbolic 
calculations in SAGE (just as I find it more natural to do statistics in 
  R).  Technically SAGE even comes with R although I prefer to maintain 
a separate additional installation of R.

Trevor Davis
Federal Reserve Board of Governors

el_eli at gmx.de wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm a R-newbie and not very familiar with the concepts of numeric and 
> symbolic programming environments.
> As an undergraduate student i have to compute a lot of symbolic stuff 
> like partial derivatives or integrals.
> For that purpose Maple or Mathematica are quite good tools, but i want 
> to stick to R.
> The following functions seem to be the ones to get symbolic derivatives:
> D (expr, name)
> deriv(expr, ...)
> deriv3(expr, ...)
> But i could'nt find any other functions for symbolic computation in R.
> So here are my questions:
> 
> Is there a function to perform a symbolic integration?
> 
> Is there a way to solve an expresion like 2*x=y for x symbolically?
> 
> Best,
> 
> Eli
>