Horner's Method for Evaluating and Deflating
Polynomials
C. Sidney Burrus,
James W. Fox,
Gary A. Sitton, and
Sven Treitel
Rice University
Houston, TX 77251-1892
November 26, 2003
Abstract
Horner's method is a standard
minimum arithmetic method for evaluating and
deflating polynomials. It can also efficiently
evaluate various order derivatives of a polynomial,
therefore is often used as part of Newton's
method. This note tries to develop the various
techniques called Horner's method, nested
evaluation, and synthetic division in a common
framework using a recursive structure and difference
equations. There is a similarity to Goertzel's
algorithm for the DFT, Z-transform inversion by
division, and Padé's and Prony's
methods. This approach also allows a straight
forward explanation of "stability" or numerical
errors of the algorithms. Matlab implementations
are given.
Related software