Bisection Method

This method is based on the repeated application of the intermediate value property. Let the function
f(x) be continuous between a and b. For definiteness, let f(a) be negative and f (b) be positive.
Then the first approximation to the root is
Step 1:Choose two values, a and b such that f(a) > 0 and f(b) < 0 .

Step 2:Calculate a midpoint c as the arithmetic mean between a and b such

that c = (a + b) / 2. This is called interval halving.

Step 3:Evaluate the function f for the value of c.

Step 4:The root of the function is found only if the value of f(c) = 0.

Step 5:If (c) ≠ 0, then we need to check the sign:

• we replace a with c if f(c) has the same sign as f(a) and we keep the same
value for b

• we replace b with c if f(c) has the same sign as f(b), and we keep the same
value for a .

• To get the right value with the new value of a or b, we go back to step 2
And recalculate c.
Note:
Since the new interval containing the root, is exactly half the length of the previous one, the interval
width is reduced by a factor of 1/2 at each step. At the end of the nth step, the new interval will
therefore, be of length (b − a)/2n . If on repeating this process n times, the latest interval is as small as
given then or

This gives the number of iterations required for achieving an accuracy

In particular, the minimum number of iterations required for converging to a root in the interval (0, 1)
for a given are as under:
The Bisection Method is a simple root finding method, easy to implement and very robust. The
disadvantages of this method is that it’s relatively slow. Because of this, most of the time, the
bisection method is used as a starting point to obtain a rough value of the solution which is used
later as a starting point for more rapidly converging methods.
Example:
(a) Find a root of the equation , using the bisection method
correct to three decimal places.

(b) Using Bisection Method find the root of the equation x=√12.

(c) Find the largest root of f(x) ≡ x 6 − x − 1 = 0 accurate to within ε = 0.001.

(d) Using the bisection method, find an approximate root of the equation
that lies between x=1 and x =1.5 (measured in radians). Carry out computations
up to the 7th stage