French Curve
Here is what my colleague dug up and his reaction to it, afterwards, and then one of mine: Pistolet, nom masculin DESSIN. Instrument de trac? permettant de dessiner les lignes courbes dans les trac?s g?om?triques. Synon. curvigraphe, virgule. Les outils de l'?crivain plumiste sont: la plume, le tire-ligne, le compas (...) le balustre pour tous les petits cercles, (...) un jeu de pistolets (CHELET, Lithogr., 1933, p.58). Un compas, un compas de r?duction, un curvigraphe, un pistolet de dessinateur, en sont des exemples (...) simples [de ?machine? ? interpolation] (RUYER, Cybern., 1954, p.43). J'aurai utilis? curvigraphe I seem to recall that when I first read about cubic splines, the splines on which they were based were flexible curves that were made to pass through knots (or ducks, I think), not at all like the rigid French curve. ken Quoting "Liaw, Andy" <andy_liaw at merck.com>:
From: Ken Knoblauch
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.
Nobody, up and down the corridor here, of age to have used one, could think of a name, but we looked it up in a universal French dictionary on the web, and it came up with ``un pistolet''.
I recall reading: E.J. Wegman and I.W. Wright. Splines in Statistics. Journal of the American Statistical Association, vol 78, N382, 1983. which mentioned `spline' as a tool that draftsmen used to draw curves, but the description does not match the french curve I know, which _is_ a template-like piece of various curvature. (I used one of these in the year I spent in Architechture school right after high school. No, I not _that_ old... I believe they are still in common used today.) Andy
____________________ Ken Knoblauch Inserm U371, Cerveau et Vision Department of Cognitive Neurosciences 18 avenue du Doyen Lepine 69675 Bron cedex France tel: +33 (0)4 72 91 34 77 fax: +33 (0)4 72 91 34 61 portable: 06 84 10 64 10 http://www.lyon.inserm.fr/371/ ______________________________________________ R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notice: This e-mail message, together with any attachment...{{dropped}}