Quadratic Stuff In North Carolina

However weird the linear interpolation of Charlotte, North Carolina’s population may be outside the range from 1970 to 1980, it seems to do nicely enough between those years. And that’s as we might expect, since we used the actual population data from the census days of 1970 and 1980 to form this interpolation. But we don’t have to make a linear interpolation. We could in principle use any function, but let’s try a simple one. This would be a quadratic polynomial, one where the variable x gets raised all the way to the second power, and one that brings back faint memories of the quadratic formula, which is one of the rare pieces of mathematics for which I have a work-related anecdote. Ask sometime if you’re interested.