Fitting an Elephant

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Because adding constants "helps" data fit a theory, there is an old joke: "Five constants?? You can fit an elephant with five constants!" In a 1975 article James Wei tested this and found that there is a least squares Fourier sine series that will fit these coordinates
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Contributed by: Roger J. Brown (March 2011)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA
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More information is available in chapter eight of Private Real Estate Investment and at mathestate.com.
J. Wei, "Least Square Fitting of an Elephant," CHEMTECH, 5(2), 1975 pp. 128–129.
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"Fitting an Elephant"
http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/FittingAnElephant/
Wolfram Demonstrations Project
Published: March 7 2011