The problem of differentiating a function with bounded second derivative in the presence of bounded measurement noise is considered. Performance limitations in terms of the smallest achievable worst-case differentiation error of causal and exact differentiators are shown. A robust exact differentiator is then constructed via the adaptation of a single parameter of a linear differentiator. It is demonstrated that the resulting differentiator is robust with respect to noise, that it instantaneously converges to the exact derivative in the absence of noise, and that it attains the smallest possible-hence optimal-upper bound on its differentiation error under noisy measurements. For practical realization in the presence of sampled measurements, a discrete-time realization is shown that achieves optimal asymptotic accuracy with respect to the noise and the sampling period.