How many real attractive fixed points can a polynomial have?

Terence Coelho, Bahman Kalantari

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

While the notion of roots of a quadratic polynomial is rudimentary in high school mathematics, that of its fixed points is uncommon. A real or complex number is a fixed point of a polynomial p (x) p (θ) = θ. The fact that the notion of fixed point of polynomials is not commonly covered in high school or undergraduate mathematics is surprising because the relevance of the fixed points of a quadratic can be demonstrated easily via iterative methods for the approximation of such numbers as, when the quadratic formula offers no remedy.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)65-76
Number of pages12
JournalMathematical Gazette
Volume103
Issue number556
DOIs
StatePublished - Mar 1 2019

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Mathematics(all)

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