In mathematics, we write a lot definitions, theorem etc. and refer to them in articles. However, among the Rmarkdown family, only bookdown has all those features that you need. Fortunately, Yihui created a feature base_format for bookdown which allows us to port it to amost all format in Rmarkdown family. Here is an example how you can do it and you may always want to write your yaml header in this way.
Add the following to the yaml header will generate a pagedown format html file.
output:
bookdown::html_document2:
base_format: pagedown::html_paged
self_contain: true
Changing pagedown::html_paged to xaringan::moon_reader will generate xaringan slides.
For beamer presentation, you may use bookdown::beamer_presentation2.
For more options for bookdown, you may run the following command getNamespaceExports("bookdown") in Rstudio Console to find out. Those names with the number 2 should be the ones with the option base_format. For example,you may type in ?bookdown::beamer_presentation2 to see the options.
One remark has to be made is that by default distill_article assigns the vale TRUE to knitr_options$opts_chunk$echo. To use the theorem environment provided by bookdown, one may add the following code chunk right after the yaml header.
```{r setup, include=FALSE}
knitr::opts_chunk$set(echo = TRUE)
```