Numerical Analysis and Computation Commons^™

A Comparison Of Solution Methods For Mandelbrot-Like Polynomials, Eunice Y. S. Chan

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

We compare two different root-finding methods, eigenvalue methods and homotopy methods, using three test problems: Mandelbrot polynomials, Fibonacci-Mandelbrot polynomials, and Narayana-Mandelbrot polynomials. For the eigenvalue methods, using both MATLAB and Maple, we computed the eigenvalues of a specialized recursively-constructed, supersparse, upper Hessenberg matrix, inspired by Piers Lawrence's original construction for the Mandelbrot polynomials, for all three families of polynomials. This led us to prove that this construction works in general. Therefore, this construction is genuinely a new kind of companion matrix. For the homotopy methods, we used a special-purpose homotopy, in which we used an equivalent differential equation to solve …