GATE CSE 1998 | Question: 1.3

Question

Which of the following statements applies to the bisection method used for finding roots of functions:

• A. converges within a few iterations

• B. guaranteed to work for all continuous functions

• C. is faster than the Newton-Raphson method

• D. requires that there be no error in determining the sign of the function

Answer 1

The answer is B. 

The method is guaranteed to converge to a root of $f$ if $f$ is a continuous function on the interval $[a, b]$ and $f(a)$ and $f(b)$ have opposite signs. The absolute error is halved at each step so the method converges linearly, which is comparatively slow.

Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisection_method#Analysis

Comments

is this in syllabus?