[R] French Curve

[Martyn Plummer]

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. 

> There's lots of splines functionality in the basic 'stats'
> package, in the recommended 'mgcv' package and even more in
> quite a few other packages.
> 
> 
>     dream> thanks in advance for your help.
> 
> You're welcome,
> Martin Maechler, ETH Zurich