10: Solving Quadratics and Rootfinding
This page is a draft and is under active development.
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- 10.1: Absolute and Relative Errors
- The definition of absolute, relative and percent errors are presented. Examples are given as well.
- 10.2: Rounding Errors and the Quadratic Formula
- The quadratic formula is a well-known way to solve quadratic equations. In this section, we show that there are certain equations that are difficult to solve when using floating-point numbers.
- 10.3: Re-examining the Quadratic Formula
- As we saw in the previous section, the quadratic formula can produce serious errors in certain circumstances. In this section, we rewrite the quadratic formula to help minimize this problem.
- 10.4: Newton’s Method
- Newton's method is a well-known and fast method to finding roots of any function which is differentiable. We develop the method here and give examples of it's use.