This is a method of solving the light curves of eclipsing binaries with small computers in reasonable amounts of time. Total, annular, and partial eclipses can be treated with equal ease in the case of spherical stars and in some cases of nonspherical stars. Very small ratios of the radii present no great difficulties, nor does orbital eccentricity. The program computes the area eclipsed at a given phase angle without the use of auxiliary functions and converges to a solution by minimizing the sum of (0 - C)2.
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Nelson et al. (1972) studied this question.