[R] French Curve

[Ken Knoblauch]

Here is what my colleague dug up and his reaction to it, afterwards,
and then one of mine:

Pistolet, nom masculin
DESSIN. Instrument de tracé permettant de dessiner les lignes courbes dans les 
tracés géométriques. Synon. curvigraphe, virgule. Les outils de l'écrivain 
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 réduction, un curvigraphe, un pistolet de dessinateur, 
en sont des exemples (...) simples [de «machine» à interpolation] (RUYER, 
Cybern., 1954, p.43).

J'aurai utilisé  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
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