Another word problem!

1.

Do exercise 15 on page 48 of the book using Newton's method. Your answer should be accurate to 4 significant digits. Again, 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). If you want/need to, you can use Maple to find the derivative of f(x), but you should be ashamed.

2.

Explain how you chose your initial value.

3.

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

SERIOUS WARNING: READ ME!

There are problems here, and on future assignments, that create a MORAL HAZARD. That is, they make it very easy for you to cheat, for example by using Maple's fsolve command to get the answer and then skipping the actual calculation.

There are two very important reasons you should not do this!

1.

It constitutes a form of academic dishonesty. If you turn in a report that says you performed an experiment when you did not, you have committed scientific fraud, and I will treat it as such.

2.

I might catch you! Keep in mind that many of the techniques we are using are conditionally stable, which means that they may or may not yield the right answer. Just because Maple gets the right answer doesn't mean you will. If I give you an ill-conditioned problem or an unstable algorithm, you had better not turn in the correct solution.