The polymerase chain reaction amplifies and quantifies small amounts of DNA. It is a cyclic process, during each cycle of which each strand of template DNA is copied with probability approaching one: the amount of DNA approximately doubles and this amount can be estimated fluorimetrically each cycle, producing a set of fluorescence values hereafter referred to as the amplification curve. Commonly the biological question of relevance is one of the ratio of DNA concentrations in two samples: a ratio that is deduced by comparing the two amplification curves, usually by way of a plot of fluorescence against cycle number. Central to this analysis is measuring the extent to which one amplification curve is shifted relative to the other, a measurement often accomplished by defining a threshold or quantification cycle, C q , for each curve: the fractional cycle number at which fluorescence reaches some threshold or at which some other criterion (maximum slope, maximum rate of change of slope) is satisfied. We propose an alternative where position is measured relative to a reference curve, position equates to the cycle shift which maximizes the correlation between the reference and the observed fluorescence sequence. A key parameter of the reference curve is obtained by fixed-point convergence.