Math problem?

Question

a)use regression to find a polynomial function n of degree 3 (cubic)that can be used to estimate the number of x years after 1940
b)estimate the number of people 65 years old and older in the u.s. in 2008
c)in what year were there approximatly30 million people 65 yrs and older in the u.s.
year 1940 1960 1980 1985 1995 2001
person
older than 65 years 9.0 16.7 25.5 28.4 33.8 35.3
(million)

Answer 1

What is the question? You are not going to do these computations by hand, so which tool are you going to use?

Is the question how to use that tool to solve the problem? The details are specific to each tool.

If the question is which tool to use, there are several options. Excel can handle this, so I assume OpenOffice can too.

R is an open source statistical package which can handle this as well as many other statistical analysis problems that Excel can't.

SciLab and Gnu Octave are free software packages that can handle numerical computations of matrices, etc. and so can do this task too, but would take some programming.