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It turns out you can literally fit an elephant with four parameters if you allow the parameters to be complex numbers.

That's cool and all, but it kind of strikes me as cheating, given that complex numbers are vectors. I mean, heck, with four parameters I can fit three elephants, if you allow the parameters to be vectors in 6-space.

You can fit any finite number of elephants with one paramter once you put it that way :)

Infinite too

The point is not so much "four", the point is "surprisingly small number".

I would've had so much fun with this on a ti83 back in high school... But more seriously: kind of makes you wonder even more, how people can believe those doomsday proclamations based on patterns in centuries-old texts.

Those types of people also believe that it's elephants all the way down. Four and a half parameters?

So, now, the trunk? Let's see it wiggle!

How to fit an elephant