A new family of modified Ostrowski’s methods with accelerated eighth order convergence

Abstract

Based on Ostrowski’s fourth order method, we derive a family of eighth order methods for the solution of nonlinear equations. In terms of computational cost the family requires three evaluations of the function and one evaluation of first derivative. Therefore, the efficiency index of the present methods is 1.682 which is better than the efficiency index 1.587 of Ostrowski’s method. Kung and Traub conjectured that multipoint iteration methods without memory based on n evaluations have optimal order 2n − 1. Thus, the family agrees with Kung–Traub conjecture for the case n = 4. The efficacy of the present methods is tested on a number of numerical examples. It is observed that our methods are competitive with other similar robust methods and very effective in high precision computations.