Point Estimation of Root Finding Methods (Lecture Notes in Mathematics, 1933)

The problem of solving nonlinear equations and systems of equations ranks among the most signi?cant in the theory and practice, not only of applied mathematicsbutalsoofmanybranchesofengineeringsciences,physics,c- puter science, astronomy, ?nance, and so on. A glance at the bibliography and the list of great mathematicians who have worked on this topic points to a high level of contemporary interest. Although the rapid development of digital computers led to the e?ective implementation of many numerical methods, in practical realization, it is necessary to solve various problems such as computational e?ciency based on the total central processor unit time, the construction of iterative methods which possess a fast convergence in the presence of multiplicity (or clusters) of a desired solution, the control of rounding errors, information about error bounds of obtained approximate solution, stating computationally veri?able initial conditions that ensure a safe convergence, etc. It is the solution of these challenging problems that was the principal motivation for the present study. In this book, we are mainly concerned with the statement and study of initial conditions that provide the guaranteed convergence of an iterative method for solving equations of the form f(z) = 0. The traditional approach to this problem is mainly based on asymptotic convergence analysis using some strong hypotheses on di?erentiability and derivative bounds in a rather wide domain.

This book sets out to state computationally verifiable initial conditions for predicting the immediate appearance of the guaranteed and fast convergence of iterative root finding methods. Attention is paid to iterative methods for simultaneous determination of polynomial zeros in the spirit of Smale's point estimation theory, introduced in 1986. Some basic concepts and Smale's theory for Newton's method, together with its modifications and higher-order methods, are presented in the first two chapters. The remaining chapters contain the recent author's results on initial conditions guaranteing convergence of a wide class of iterative methods for solving algebraic equations.

These conditions are of practical interest since they depend only on available data, the information of a function whose zeros are sought and initial approximations. The convergence approach presented can be applied in designing a package for the simultaneous approximation of polynomial zeros.