Examples

To demonstrate the use of the general polynomial solver we will take the polynomial @math{P(x) = x^5 - 1} which has the following roots,

The following program will find these roots.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <gsl/gsl_poly.h>

int
main (void)
{
  int i;
  /* coefficient of P(x) =  -1 + x^5  */
  double a[6] = { -1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1 };  
  double z[10];

  gsl_poly_complex_workspace * w 
      = gsl_poly_complex_workspace_alloc (6);
  
  gsl_poly_complex_solve (a, 6, w, z);

  gsl_poly_complex_workspace_free (w);

  for (i = 0; i < 5; i++)
    {
      printf("z%d = %+.18f %+.18f\n", 
             i, z[2*i], z[2*i+1]);
    }

  return 0;
}

The output of the program is,

bash$ ./a.out 
z0 = -0.809016994374947451 +0.587785252292473137
z1 = -0.809016994374947451 -0.587785252292473137
z2 = +0.309016994374947451 +0.951056516295153642
z3 = +0.309016994374947451 -0.951056516295153642
z4 = +1.000000000000000000 +0.000000000000000000

which agrees with the analytic result, @math{z_n = \exp(2 \pi n i/5)}.