grid will be divided in 3 child-triangles, and on each child triangle the interpolated function is a cubic polynomial of the 2 coordinates). This technique originates from FEM (Finite Element Method) analysis; the element used is a reduced Hsieh-Clough-Tocher (HCT) element. Its shape functions are described in [1]_. The assembled function is guaranteed to be C1-smooth, i.e. it is continuous and its first derivatives are also continuous (this is easy to show inside the triangles but is also true when crossing the edges). In the default case (*kind* ='min_E'), the interpolant minimizes a curvature energy on the functional space generated by the HCT element shape functions - with imposed values but arbitrary derivatives at each node. The minimized functional is the integral of the so-called total curvature (implementation based on an algorithm from [2]_ - PCG sparse solver): .. math:: E(z) = \frac{1}{2} \int_{\Omega} \left( \left( \frac{\partial^2{z}}{\partial{x}^2} \right)^2 + \left( \frac{\partial^2{z}}{\partial{y}^2} \right)^2 + 2\left( \frac{\partial^2{z}}{\partial{y}\partial{x}} \right)^2 \right) dx\,dy If the case *kind* ='geom' is chosen by the user, a simple geometric approximation is used (weighted average of the triangle normal vectors), which could improve speed on very large grids. References ---------- .. [1] Michel Bernadou, Kamal Hassan, "Basis functions for general Hsieh-Clough-Tocher triangles, complete or reduced.", International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering, 17(5):784 - 789. 2.01. .. [2] C.T. Kelley, "Iterative Methods for Optimization". Ú