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A value c that satisfies this equation, that is, f (c) = 0, is called a root or zero of the function f and is a solution of the original equation. If f is a continuous function and there exist two points a 0 and b 0 such that f ( a 0 ) and f ( b 0 ) are of opposite signs, then, by the intermediate value theorem , the function f has a root in ...
Finding roots in a specific region of the complex plane, typically the real roots or the real roots in a given interval (for example, when roots represents a physical quantity, only the real positive ones are interesting). For finding one root, Newton's method and other general iterative methods work generally well.
However, most root-finding algorithms do not guarantee that they will find all roots of a function, and if such an algorithm does not find any root, that does not necessarily mean that no root exists. Most numerical root-finding methods are iterative methods, producing a sequence of numbers that ideally converges towards a root as a limit.
In this case a and b are said to bracket a root since, by the intermediate value theorem, the continuous function f must have at least one root in the interval (a, b). At each step the method divides the interval in two parts/halves by computing the midpoint c = (a+b) / 2 of the interval and the value of the function f(c) at that point.
In the figure, Excel is used to find the smallest root of the quadratic equation x 2 + bx + c = 0 for c = 4 and c = 4 × 10 5. The difference between direct evaluation using the quadratic formula and the approximation described above for widely spaced roots is plotted vs. b.
Then for each interval (A(x), M(x)) in the list, the algorithm remove it from the list; if the number of sign variations of the coefficients of A is zero, there is no root in the interval, and one passes to the next interval. If the number of sign variations is one, the interval defined by () and () is an isolating interval.
The main objective of interval arithmetic is to provide a simple way of calculating upper and lower bounds of a function's range in one or more variables. These endpoints are not necessarily the true supremum or infimum of a range since the precise calculation of those values can be difficult or impossible; the bounds only need to contain the function's range as a subset.
In numerical analysis, the secant method is a root-finding algorithm that uses a succession of roots of secant lines to better approximate a root of a function f. The secant method can be thought of as a finite-difference approximation of Newton's method , so it is considered a quasi-Newton method .