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27 lines
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.. _chapter-history:
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History
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Ceres Solver grew out of the need for general least squares solving at
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Google. In early 2010, Sameer Agarwal and Fredrik Schaffalitzky
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started the development of Ceres Solver. Fredrik left Google shortly
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thereafter and Keir Mierle stepped in to take his place. After two
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years of on-and-off development, Ceres Solver was released as open
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source in May of 2012.
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Origin of the name
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------------------
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While there is some debate as to who invented the method of Least
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Squares [Stigler]_, there is no debate that it was `Carl Friedrich
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Gauss
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<http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Gauss.html>`_
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who brought it to the attention of the world. Using just 22
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observations of the newly discovered asteroid `Ceres
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<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceres_(dwarf_planet)>`_, Gauss used the
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method of least squares to correctly predict when and where the
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asteroid will emerge from behind the Sun [TenenbaumDirector]_. We
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named our solver after Ceres to celebrate this seminal event in the
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history of astronomy, statistics and optimization.
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