[madhadron]

I find this history confusing. Legendre guessing by hand? Spaghetti on the wall? No mention of the massive work of Laplace and others that led up to Legendre and Gauss, or Gauss's connection of the notion to probability? This is truly a bizarre view.

And then the idea that numerical optimization accounting for the slope was novel. How does he think that mathematicians calculated for the preceding centuries?

Linear regression springs full formed in the 1950's and '60's? What happened to Fisher and Student and Pearson and all the rest?

Where's Hopfield? Where's Potts? Where's an awareness of the history of mathematics in general?