[R] French Curve

[Marc Schwartz]

On Fri, 2005-04-01 at 17:00 +0200, Martyn Plummer wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-04-01 at 09:30 +0200, Martin Maechler wrote:
> > >>>>> "dream" == dream home <dreamhouse at gmail.com>
> > >>>>>     on Wed, 30 Mar 2005 12:27:08 -0800 writes:
> > 
> >     dream> Dear R experts, Did someone implemented French Curve
> >     dream> yet?  Or can anyone point me some papers that I can
> >     dream> follow to implement it?
> > 
> > Are you talking about "splines" ?
> > 
> > I vaguely remember having read that in the distant past, splines
> > were sometimes called "French curves".
> 
> I found this:
> 
> G. Wahba and S. Wold, "A completely automatic french curve: Fitting
> splines by cross validation," Commun. Statist., vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 1-17,
> 1975.
> 
> I remember that my father had a French curve: it was a plastic template
> used for drawing which had several smooth edges of varying curvature.
> You could use it to draw a wide variety of curved shapes.  No doubt the
> French called it something else. 


http://mathworld.wolfram.com/FrenchCurve.html

Martyn,

My dad had one as well, along with his slide rule...then he later "moved
up" to a TI DataMath as I recall... ;-)

These days he is retired (was a medical school professor) and works on a
G5.

Best regards,

Marc