In "A Project on Circles in Space," Carl Cowen provided an algebraic solution for the problem of fitting a circle to a set of points in space. His technique used the singular value decomposition from linear algebra, and was recast as a project in the volume ATLAST: Computer Exercises for Linear Algebra. Both versions of the problem used MATLAB® for the calculations. In this worksheet, we implement the algebraic calculations in Maple, then add noise to the data to test the robustness of the algebraic method. Next, we solve the problem with an analytic approach that incorporates least squares, and appears to be more robust in the face of noisy data. Finally, the analytic approach leads to explicit formulas for the fitting circle, so we end with graphs of the data, fitting circle, and plane lying closest to the data in the least-squares sense.

_{Simulink is a registered trademark of The MathWorks, Inc.}