Welcome to the repository for fitting an elephant with four parameters! Inspired by Enrico Fermiโs famous critique, this project dives into the mathematical challenge with a fun and colorful twist. ๐
In 1953, Enrico Fermi criticized Dysonโs model by quoting Johnny von Neumann: "With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk." ๐ So far, there have been several attempts to fit an elephant using four parameters, but as the problem has not been well-defined, the current methods do not really satisfy the requirements. This paper defines the problem and presents an attempt. ๐
- Wei (1975): Used Fourier series to fit an elephant, requiring over 20 parameters for a reasonably good fit. โ๏ธ๐
- Mayer et al. (2010): Claimed to fit an elephant using four complex numbers (eight parameters in total). ๐จ๐
- Piantadosi (2018): Proposed a one-parameter solution that essentially encodes the shape into a real number with high precision. ๐ข๐
This repository contains the implementation of our method to fit an elephant with four parameters, adhering to the constraints defined in the paper. ๐๏ธ๐งฎ
You can read the full paper detailing our approach here. ๐โจ