CHAPTER 1

Solutions of Nonlinear Equations

1.1. Computer Arithmetics 1.1.1. Denitions. The following notation and terminology will be used. (1) If a is the exact value of a computation and a is an approximate value for the same computation, then =a a is the error in a and || is the absolute error. If a = 0, r = a a = a a

is the relative error in a . (2) Upper bounds for the absolute and relative errors in a are numbers Ba and Br such that || = |a a| < Ba , |r | = a a < Br , a

respectively. (3) A roundo error occurs when a computer approximates a real number by a number with only a nite number of digits to the right of the decimal point (see Subsection 1.1.2). (4) In scientic computation, the oating point representation of a number c of length d in the base is c = 0.b1 b2 bd N , where b1 = 0, 0 bi < . We call b1 b2 bd the mantissa or decimal part and N the exponent of c. For instance, with d = 5 and = 10, 0.27120 102 , 0.31224 103 .

(5) The number of signicant digits of a oating point number is the number of digits counted from the rst to the last nonzero digits. For example, with d = 4 and = 10, the number of signicant digits of the three numbers: 0.1203 102 , 0.1230 102 , 0.1000 103 ,

is 4, 3, and 1, respectively. (6) The term truncation error is used for the error committed when an innite series is truncated after a nite number of terms.
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