Show HN: Python 3 pyGtk graphical curve and surface fitter

This is James Phillips, author of pyGtk.

my background is in nuclear engineering and industrial radiation physics, as I started working in the U.S. Navy as a submarine nuclear reactor operator many, many neutrons ago.

I have quite a bit of international experience calibrating industrial metal thickness and coating gauges. For example the thicker a piece of steel the more radiation it absorbs, and measuring the amount of radiation that passes through a sheet of steel can tell you how thick it is without touching it. Another example is that the thicker a zinc coating on steel sheets, the more zinc X-ray fluorescence energy it can emit - again allowing accurate thickness measurement for industrial manufacture.

My post-Navy employer originally used ad-hoc spreadsheets to very tediously create 4th-order polynomials calibrating to readings from known samples. So I started writing my own curve-fitting software in C.

When X-rays pass through aluminium, the atomic weight of the alloying elements is much greater than that of the aluminium itself such that small changes in alloy composition lead to large changes in X-ray transmission for the same thickness. Alloy changes look like thickness changes, egad! However, alloy changes also cause changes to the X-rays that are scattered back from the aluminium, so that if both the transmitted and backscattered radiation is measured a more alloy-insensitive measurement can be made - but this is now a 3D surface fit, and I started writing surface fitting software. I began to do considerable international work.

This finally led to the development of my Python fitting libraries, and this example pyGtk curve and surface fitter. I also have Python 2 and 3 tkinter, wxPython and django versions on GitHub.

James