| Carlos Hernandez | 79397c2 | 2014-08-07 17:51:38 -0700 | [diff] [blame] | 1 | .. _chapter-history: |
| 2 | |
| 3 | ======= |
| 4 | History |
| 5 | ======= |
| 6 | |
| 7 | Ceres Solver grew out of the need for general least squares solving at |
| 8 | Google. In early 2010, Sameer Agarwal and Fredrik Schaffalitzky |
| 9 | started the development of Ceres Solver. Fredrik left Google shortly |
| 10 | thereafter and Keir Mierle stepped in to take his place. After two |
| 11 | years of on-and-off development, Ceres Solver was released as open |
| 12 | source in May of 2012. |
| 13 | |
| 14 | Origin of the name |
| 15 | ------------------ |
| 16 | |
| 17 | While there is some debate as to who invented the method of Least |
| 18 | Squares [Stigler]_, there is no debate that it was `Carl Friedrich |
| 19 | Gauss |
| 20 | <http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Gauss.html>`_ |
| 21 | who brought it to the attention of the world. Using just 22 |
| 22 | observations of the newly discovered asteroid `Ceres |
| 23 | <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceres_(dwarf_planet)>`_, Gauss used the |
| 24 | method of least squares to correctly predict when and where the |
| 25 | asteroid will emerge from behind the Sun [TenenbaumDirector]_. We |
| 26 | named our solver after Ceres to celebrate this seminal event in the |
| 27 | history of astronomy, statistics and optimization. |