New bounds for the Descartes method

  • Authors:
  • Werner Krandick;Kurt Mehlhorn

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, Drexel University, 3141 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA;Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik, Stuhlsatzenhausweg 85, 66123 Saarbrücken, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Symbolic Computation
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

We give a new bound for the number of recursive subdivisions in the Descartes method for polynomial real root isolation. Our proof uses Ostrowski's theory of normal power series from 1950 which has so far been overlooked in the literature. We combine Ostrowski's results with a theorem of Davenport from 1985 to obtain our bound. We also characterize normality of cubic polynomials by explicit conditions on their roots and derive a generalization of one of Ostrowski's theorems.