Welcome to the repository for fitting an elephant with four parameters! Inspired by Enrico Fermi’s famous critique, this project dives into the mathematical challenge with a fun and colorful twist. 🌈
In 1953, Enrico Fermi criticized Dyson’s model by quoting Johnny von Neumann: "With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk." 🐘 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. 🌟
- Wei (1975): Used Fourier series to fit an elephant, requiring over 20 parameters for a reasonably good fit. ✏️🐘
- Mayer et al. (2010): Claimed to fit an elephant using four complex numbers (eight parameters in total). 🎨🐘
- Piantadosi (2018): Proposed a one-parameter solution that essentially encodes the shape into a real number with high precision. 🔢🐘
This repository contains the implementation of our method to fit an elephant with four parameters, adhering to the constraints defined in the paper. 🖌️🧮
You can read the full paper detailing our approach here. 📄✨