Persona 3 Reload: What else do people call this curve?

Maybe I’m a math dunce, but I reckon the hardest questions in Persona 3 Reload are the geometry questions in Ms. Miyahara’s math class. On June 22 (6/22), she asks Junpei the name of a particular type of curve, and he turns to you for help.

Ms. Miyahara, with her overbite and enormous balloon-like afro, already stumped you back in April with a question about algebraic spirals, and this one is similarly difficult. She shows you a picture of a geometric curve, then demands to be told what people call it.

What else do people call the versiera (versed sine curve)?

Now, anyone can spot, at a glance, that the curve Ms. Miyahara shows you is the versiera, which is Italian for “versed sine curve.” I’m kidding, of course. I wouldn’t have known that in a billion years. But ol’ balloon hair isn’t interested in its Italian name anyway. She’s testing to see if you know the slightly more common, colloquial name for this curve, and you’ve got three possible answers:

• Orthogonal curves
• Fermat’s spiral
• Witch of Agnesi

Now, I personally found this question a little easier than the one about algebraic spirals, which I still got wrong even after Googling it. For this one, I simply Googled each of the three possible answers, and it was pretty obvious which one was a match for the image. People call this curve the Witch of Agnesi, so that’s the answer. Answering correctly will impress your classmates and increase your Charm social stat.

How did the Witch of Agnesi gain the first half of its name?

The Witch of Agnesi comes up again in the final exams, but this time, the question is completely different. I may have fast-forwarded through Ms. Miyahara’s lesson, or maybe fallen asleep (like, for real, not in the game), but I’m pretty sure she didn’t mention anything about where the Witch of Agnesi’s name came from.

But, in the mathematics exam on July 15 (7/15), you’re asked how the Witch of Agnesi got its name, and given four possible answers:

• The shape is bewitching
• Its enchanting formula
• An error in translation
• A witch invented it

Fortunately, the origin of the Witch of Agnesi’s name is mentioned almost right at the top of the Wikipedia page. The word “witch” was a mistranslation, so the Witch of Agnesi gained the first half of its name due to a translation error. The answer is, of course, “An error in translation.”