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Fitting an Elephant with Four Non-Zero Parameters


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 completely satisfy the requirements. This paper defines the problem and presents an attempt.

View a PDF of the paper titled Fitting an Elephant with Four non-Zero Parameters, by Dian Jin and 1 other authors View PDFHTML (experimental) Abstract: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 completely satisfy the requirements.

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