Practical Handbook of Curve Fitting

Introduction Theoretical Background

Overview

Computers offer even the casual user opportunities to handle data that were seldom dreamed of a decade ago. Most spreadsheets and other software packages that have some sort of analytic capability offer an option to graph input data; indeed, even many hand-held calculators do so. Default graphs generated by the computer often link points in a kind of follow the dots fashion; while this is a useful feature, default curves of this sort do not generally assign an equation to the curve. Thus, these curves cannot be projected nor can they be used for systematic interpolation between values. Many of the same software packages that offer default curves also permit the user to insert equations and to generate ...