Finding the zeros of a nonlinear equation ƒ (x) = 0, is a classical problem which has nice applications in various branches of science and engineering. In this paper, we introduce four iterative methods which is based on the central-difference and forward-difference approximations to derivatives. It is proved that three of the four methods have cubic convergence and another method has quadratic convergence. The best property of these methods are that do not need to calculate any derivative. In order to demonstrate convergence properties of the introduced methods, several numerical examples are given.
Newton’s method; cubic convergence; quadratic convergence; nonlinear equations; iterative method
