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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.
b k is the current iterate, i.e., the current guess for the root of f. a k is the "contrapoint," i.e., a point such that f(a k) and f(b k) have opposite signs, so the interval [a k, b k] contains the solution. Furthermore, |f(b k)| should be less than or equal to |f(a k)|, so that b k is a better guess for the unknown solution than a k.
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.
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.
Similarly for numbers between other squares. This method will yield a correct first digit, but it is not accurate to one digit: the first digit of the square root of 35 for example, is 5, but the square root of 35 is almost 6. A better way is to the divide the range into intervals halfway between the squares.
Applying Newton's method to find the root of g(x) recovers quadratic convergence in many cases although it generally involves the second derivative of f(x). In a particularly simple case, if f(x) = x m then g(x) = x / m and Newton's method finds the root in a single iteration with
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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 .