Word problem!

1.

Do exercise 15 on page 41 of the book, using Bisection, False Position, or Secant. Be sure to indicate which method you think you are using. You can use any precision arithmetic, and you can use either Maple, a calculator, or a general-purpose programming language (but you cannot use anyone else's implementation of any root-finding method).

2.

Explain how you chose your initial interval. This is an often neglected step, but it is an important part of the algorithm.

3.

Use Maple's fsolve command to check your answer, but don't cheat by using the correct answer to choose the initial interval.

The Maple command to solve a non-linear equation using numerical techniques is fsolve. If you type ?fsolve at the Maple prompt, you will get the help page for this command, which you can print.