.. _chapter-history:

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History
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Ceres Solver grew out of the need for general least squares solving at
Google. In early 2010, Sameer Agarwal and Fredrik Schaffalitzky
started the development of Ceres Solver. Fredrik left Google shortly
thereafter and Keir Mierle stepped in to take his place. After two
years of on-and-off development, Ceres Solver was released as open
source in May of 2012.

Origin of the name
------------------

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://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Gauss.html>`_
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.