About the Author I am a retired engineer from one of the big three auto companies. Much of what I did during the first 15 years dealt with gears. A person familiar with gears and the calculations involved with them will see a similarity between the math behind gearing and the math in the model. The second 12 years I worked mainly on problem solving and product improvement using experimentation. I worked with a group of engineers on a gear driven pump and secondary force balancer and the development of the processes required to produce it.
In 1980 I became involved with statistics and different methods of dealing with variation. It was during the early 1980's that the automotive companies began to realize the connection of statistics, systems and quality and I was fortunate to have the opportunity to learn from many of the greatest systems and statistical minds of our time.
When I realized how important it was for people to grasp several counter-intuitive concepts when dealing with variation I developed several computer models to aid in the training and understanding of these ideas. Watching people being trained in these techniques I found it was easy for them to understand the concepts but when they attempted to integrate them into their jobs they couldn't. The problem appeared to be in the ability of people to change their intuition, this intuition appeared to have many external influences. I was in the process of developing a new model I thought would help when I ran across the Agnesi formula. That was three years ago. I was trapped into finding out why this simple formula, the way Maria Agnesi drew it, could exist.
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