Diyashvir Kreetee Rajiv Babajee

Kung-Traub’s conjecture states that an optimal iterative method based on d function evaluations for finding a simple zero of a nonlinear function could achieve a maximum convergence order of 2 ^d−1. During the last years, many attempts have been made to prove this conjecture or develop optimal methods which satisfy the conjecture. We understand from the conjecture that the maximum order reached by a method with three function evaluations is four, even for quadratic functions. In this paper, we show that the conjecture fails for quadratic functions. In fact, we can find a 2-point method with three function evaluations reaching fifth order convergence. We also develop 2-point 3rd to 8th order methods with one function and two first derivative evaluations using weight functions. Furthermore, we show that with the same number of function evaluations we can develop higher order 2-point methods of order r + 2 , where r is a positive integer, ≥ 1 . We also show that we can develop a higher order method with the same number of function evaluations if we know the asymptotic error constant of the previous method. We prove the local convergence of these methods which we term as Babajee’s Quadratic Iterative Methods and we extend these methods to systems involving quadratic equations. We test our methods with some numerical experiments including an application to Chandrasekhar’s integral equation arising in radiative heat transfer theory.

In this work, we have developed a fourth order Newton-like method based on harmonic mean and its multi-step version for solving system of nonlinear equations. The new fourth order method requires evaluation of one function and two first order Fréchet derivatives for each iteration. The multi-step version requires one more function evaluation for each iteration. The proposed new scheme does not require the evaluation of second or higher order Fréchet derivatives and still reaches fourth order convergence. The multi-step version converges with order 2r+4, where r is a positive integer and r ≥ 1. We have proved that the root α is a point of attraction for a general iterative function, whereas the proposed new schemes also satisfy this result. Numerical experiments including an application to 1-D Bratu problem are given to illustrate the efficiency of the new methods. Also, the new methods are compared with some existing methods.

In this paper, we present three improvements to a three-point third order variant of Newton’s method derived from the Simpson rule. The first one is a fifth order method using the same number of functional evaluations as the third order method, the second one is a four-point 10th order method and the last one is a five-point 20th order method. In terms of computational point of view, our methods require four evaluations (one function and three first derivatives) to get fifth order, five evaluations (two functions and three derivatives) to get 10th order and six evaluations (three functions and three derivatives) to get 20th order. Hence, these methods have efficiency indexes of 1.495, 1.585 and 1.648, respectively which are better than the efficiency index of 1.316 of the third order method. We test the methods through some numerical experiments which show that the 20th order method is very efficient.

Finding methods for generating Pythagorean triples have been of great interest to Mathematicians since the Babylonians (from 1900 to 1600 BC). One of these methods is the less known two-fraction method which works for any two fractions whose product is 2. In this work, we analyse the method and show that it can be obtained from the fact that the excess of a right-angled triangle is even. Using this property, we develop several formulae for generating Primitive Pythagorean Triples.