Lecture 7. 



Secant Method

The Secant method is a variant of Newton's method does not use derivatives. The behaviour of the secant method is very similar to Newton's method, that it, it usually has a good rate of convergence, but sometimes it can fail.

Hybrid Method(s)
The idea of hybrid root finding methods is to maintain a pair of values that brackets a zero. An iteration compares the result of some fast converging algorithm (for example the secant method or inverse quadratic interpolation) to the bracketing pair. If the value is bracketed then it's kept, otherwise we use a step of the Bisection algorithm. (Note: A sharp eyed classmate pointed out that the algorithm I wrote on the board should be "if x is not bracketed x = value of a bisection step.)

Explorations with Matlab
We looked at some Matlab functions today. Some of the functions I wrote (e.g. bisectDR), and others are from Recktenwald (e.g. bisect) and still others are from the Matlab toolbox (e.g. fzero).
Here is the Matlab function m-file that I wrote to plot a guitar's fretboard.


function fretboard(r);

% fretboard draws a fret board of length 10 where the ith fret is
% placed at a distance of 10/r^i from the nut which is on the right.
%
% Synopsis: fretboard(r)
%
% Input: r = the ratio beween consecutive frets
% For equal tempered tuning the value of r should
% be an approximation so that r^12 = 2.


%Draw fretboard from nut to bridge as a box.

hold on % Allow overlaying of plots onto the same graphics window.

% Draw the outline of the guitar neck
BX = [0,0,10,10,0];
BY = [0,1,1,0,0];

plot(BX,BY)

%plot 22 frets
fx=10;
for i = 1:22
fx = (fx / r );
plot([fx,fx],[0,1])
end

% Set the axis equal so that we get a long and narrow fretboard
axis equal 

Posted: Mon - September 25, 2006 at 03:20 PM          


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