Good luck fitting an exponential to the table of population over time in eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_San_Francisco https://en.wikipedia.org

Good luck fitting an exponential to the table of population over time in eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_San_Francisco https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_San_Francisco Of course, you can do it piecewise, but you can also fit a piecewise linear curve (or even a step function) to any graph. Or fit an exponential to the graph in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population Just eyeballing the global data from 1950 to 2020 it looks like linear growth would be a much better fit than exponential. You might also want to look at logistic growth, see eg https://sites.math.duke.edu/education/ccp/materials/diffeq/logistic/logi1.html https://sites.math.duke.edu/education/ccp/materials/diffeq/l...