| .. _chapter-about: | |
| ===== | |
| About | |
| ===== | |
| Ceres Solver grew out of the need for general least squares solving at Google. | |
| Around 2010, Sameer Agarwal and Keir Mierle decided to replace a custom bundle | |
| adjuster at Google with something more modern. After two years of on-and-off | |
| development, Ceres Solver was released as open source in May of 2012. | |
| Acknowledgements | |
| ---------------- | |
| A number of people have helped with the development and open sourcing | |
| of Ceres. | |
| Fredrik Schaffalitzky when he was at Google started the development of | |
| Ceres, and even though much has changed since then, many of the ideas | |
| from his original design are still present in the current code. | |
| Amongst Ceres' users at Google two deserve special mention: William | |
| Rucklidge and James Roseborough. William was the first user of | |
| Ceres. He bravely took on the task of porting production code to an | |
| as-yet unproven optimization library, reporting bugs and helping fix | |
| them along the way. James is perhaps the most sophisticated user of | |
| Ceres at Google. He has reported and fixed bugs and helped evolve the | |
| API for the better. | |
| Since the initial release of Ceres, a number of people have | |
| contributed to Ceres by porting it to new platforms, reporting bugs, | |
| fixing bugs and adding new functionality. We acknowledge all of these | |
| contributions in the :ref:`chapter-version-history`. | |
| Origin of the name Ceres Solver | |
| ------------------------------- | |
| While there is some debate as to who invented the method of Least Squares | |
| [Stigler]_, there is no debate that it was `Carl Friedrich Gauss | |
| <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_Gauss>`_ who brought it to the | |
| attention of the world. Using just 22 observations of the newly discovered | |
| asteroid `Ceres <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceres_(dwarf_planet)>`_, Gauss | |
| used the method of least squares to correctly predict when and where the | |
| asteroid will emerge from behind the Sun [TenenbaumDirector]_. We named our | |
| solver after Ceres to celebrate this seminal event in the history of astronomy, | |
| statistics and optimization. | |