Exercise Solution 2.20

The secant method employs the recursive formula

[2.147]

Starting with seed values x^[1] = 0 and x^[2] = 1 , we apply [2.147] recursively. Results are indicated below.

Exhibit s1: As with Newton’s method, convergence with the secant method is often rapid.

Our function f actually has three roots. In this and the previous exercise we have found two of them.