Copyright © 2012 F. Soleymani and S. Shateyi. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Optimization problems defined by (objective) functions for which derivatives are unavailable or available at an expensive cost are emerging in computational science. Due to this, the main aim of this paper is to attain as high as possible of local convergence order by using fixed number of (functional) evaluations to find efficient solvers for one-variable nonlinear equations, while the procedure to achieve this goal is totally free from derivative. To this end, we consider the fourth-order uniparametric family of Kung and Traub to suggest and demonstrate two classes of three-step derivative-free methods using only four pieces of information per full iteration to reach the optimal order eight and the optimal efficiency index 1.682. Moreover, a large number of numerical tests are considered to confirm the applicability and efficiency of the produced methods from the new classes.