On the speed of convergence of Newton's method for complex polynomials

Todor Bilarev, Magnus Aspenberg, Dierk Schleicher

Published 2012-02-11, updated 2014-08-25Version 2

We investigate Newton's method for complex polynomials of arbitrary degree $d$, normalized so that all their roots are in the unit disk. For each degree $d$, we give an explicit set $\mathcal{S}_d$ of $3.33d\log^2 d(1 + o(1))$ points with the following universal property: for every normalized polynomial of degree $d$ there are $d$ starting points in $\mathcal{S}_d$ whose Newton iterations find all the roots with a low number of iterations: if the roots are uniformly and independently distributed, we show that with probability at least $1-2/d$ the number of iterations for these $d$ starting points to reach all roots with precision $\varepsilon$ is $O(d^2\log^4 d + d\log|\log \varepsilon|)$. This is an improvement of an earlier result in \cite{Schleicher}, where the number of iterations is shown to be $O(d^4\log^2 d + d^3\log^2d|\log \varepsilon|)$ in the worst case (allowing multiple roots) and $O(d^3\log^2 d(\log d + \log \delta) + d\log|\log \varepsilon|)$ for well-separated (so-called $\delta$-separated) roots. Our result is almost optimal for this kind of starting points in the sense that the number of iterations can never be smaller than $O(d^2)$ for fixed $\varepsilon$.