What is Curve Fit?

Curve Fit is a program written for scientists, science students or anyone who wants to fit user defined functions to a set of data points.  (At present it does not produce nice graphs for presentation.)  I originally wrote it because I wanted to fit some specific equations to my data.  The popular commercial graphics packages allow you to fit linear, polynomial and logarithmic curves to data, but most packages don’t let you specify your own equation.  However Curve Fit allows you to fit equations such as y = ax+b+c/x.  A trivial but annoying example is fitting a straight line through the origin.  Many popular programs fit the equation y = ax + b, however they decide what value to use for b and it isn’t necessarily zero.  Curve Fit lets you either constrain b to zero or simply fit the equation y = ax.  There is one good commercial package that lets you define your own equations but it doesn’t allow the user to directly manipulate the coefficients or constrain them to chosen values.  Curve Fit is very flexible in this regard and gives you control over which coefficients will be optimized and even which mathematical algorithm will be used.  Curve Fit can also be used simply to plot and analyse specific mathematical functions without necessarily fitting them to any data points.

Raner, Kevin. (January 1992). Curve Fit Doc. Electronic Document.

Download Curve Fit for Mac

Architecture

Motorola 68K

System Requirements

From Mac OS 4.2

Compatibility notes

Minimum Requirements

• Macintosh 512Ke
• System 4.2

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Mini vMac