Talk:Ribbon diagram

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An entry from Ribbon diagram appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know? column on June 5, 2007.

[edit] B-splines versus Hermite splines

The comment about B-splines versus Hermite splines is a little dubious. B-splines and Hermite splines are two different representations for the same underlying piecewise polynomial curve. In fact the article on B-spline points out that "A fundamental theorem states that every spline function of a given degree, smoothness, and domain partition, can be represented as a linear combination of B-splines of that same degree and smoothness, and over that same partition." Therefore, problems of fitting the data are all in how the fitting problem is posed, and have nothing to do with the choice between these two equivalent basis functions.

I think the article is better off if it simply says that a polynomial spline is fitted through the points, and leaves aside the implementation details of which representation is chosen for the spline. JohnAspinall (talk) 18:11, 31 March 2008 (UTC)