Foreword

What Minuit is intended to do.

Minuit is conceived as a tool to find the minimum value of a multi-parameter function and analyze the shape of the function around the minimum. The principal application is foreseen for statistical analysis, working on chisquare or log-likelihood functions, to compute the best-fit parameter values and uncertainties, including correlations between the parameters. It is especially suited to handle difficult problems, including those which may require guidance in order to find the correct solution.

What Minuit is not intended to do.

Although Minuit will of course solve easy problems faster than complicated ones, it is not intended for the repeated solution of identically parametrized problems (such as track fitting in a detector) where a specialized program will in general be much more efficient.