Found In Space – a.k.

a.k. from thus spake a.k.

Some time ago we saw how Newton's method used the derivative of a univariate scalar valued function to guide the search for an argument at which it took a specific value. A related problem is finding a vector at which a multivariate vector valued function takes one, or at least comes as close as possible to it. In particular, we should often like to fit an arbitrary parametrically defined scalar valued functional form to a set of points with possibly noisy values, much as we did using linear regression to find the best fitting weighted sum of a given set of functions, and in this post we shall see how we can generalise Newton's method to solve such problems.