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Past exam of the year 1 of the computer science course of the University of Oxford 2023 Discrete mathematics, probability and continuous mathematics 6 f Solution by
Codex 0 2026-10-25
Choose (iii), . Here the root has magnitude between and . Machine epsilon measures relative precision near unity; the spacing of representable floating-point numbers near the root is therefore of order . A step tolerance scaled to that magnitude is consistent with the attainable absolute positional accuracy. For IEEE binary64, using , , comparable to the local spacing. A fixed numerical constant cannot promise an exact correctly rounded root, but this is the most sensible of the three proposals.
Condition (ii) asks for a step below , a scale appropriate near one rather than near this root. A nonzero representable change near the root is normally much larger. The test may trigger only after exact stagnation, and rounding-induced oscillation can prevent that; it asks for unnecessarily fine absolute resolution.
Condition (i) measures a residual, not a position error. It changes if the same root problem is multiplied by a constant. Moreover, evaluating can involve cancellation among quantities of order , so an absolute residual of order need not be meaningful or attainable. Here , making residual and position errors comparable in exact arithmetic, but their requested absolute scale is still too small. A practical scale-aware stopping criterion for Newton iteration should also detect stagnation or a cycle rather than assuming exact arithmetic persists indefinitely.
Past exam of the year 1 of the computer science course of the University of Oxford 2023 Discrete mathematics, probability and continuous mathematics 6 e Solution by
Codex 0 2026-10-25
First control the denominator. The mean value theorem applied to yields, for ,Thus is strictly increasing on and all proposed Newton steps within that interval are defined.
Assume . Then and , so . Apply Taylor's theorem instead at the root, expanding about :After rearranging and substituting the Newton step, the signed error satisfiesConsequently . Starting from , mathematical induction proves this for every finite , establishing that the signed errors are negative and strictly increasing. Since and ,Writing gives . Since , this also implies , proving quadratic convergence. This is the concave Newton iteration from below.
Past exam of the year 1 of the computer science course of the University of Oxford 2023 Discrete mathematics, probability and continuous mathematics 6 d Solution by
Codex 0 2026-10-25
Set . By Taylor's theorem,The first two terms cancel by the definition of the Newton root-finding iteration. Thuswith between the consecutive iterates. In particular, a nonzero step has negative new residual under the stated strict concavity.
Past exam of the year 1 of the computer science course of the University of Oxford 2023 Discrete mathematics, probability and continuous mathematics 6 c Solution by
Codex 0 2026-10-25
The Newton root-finding iteration gives .
Past exam of the year 1 of the computer science course of the University of Oxford 2023 Discrete mathematics, probability and continuous mathematics 6 b Solution by
Codex 0 2026-10-25
Taylor's theorem at zero gives for a point between zero and . At , strict negativity of the second derivative gives . At , its lower bound givesBy the intermediate value theorem there is a root strictly between these values. The given uniqueness identifies it as .
Past exam of the year 1 of the computer science course of the University of Oxford 2023 Discrete mathematics, probability and continuous mathematics 6 a Solution by
Codex 0 2026-10-25
The Newton root-finding iteration isIt requires and its derivative to be defined at the current point, and requires . A step can leave the domain, making a subsequent iteration undefined. In floating-point arithmetic, division by zero, overflow or non-finite function evaluations can also prevent a usable step. At a root where is zero the displayed quotient itself remains undefined unless the implementation stops before evaluating it.
Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project
Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
Intro to OurBigBook
. Source. We have two killer features:
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- a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
- a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.Figure 1. Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page. View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivativeVideo 2. OurBigBook Web topics demo. Source. - local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
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Figure 2. You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either OurBigBook.com or as a static website.Figure 3. Visual Studio Code extension installation.Figure 5. . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally. Video 3. Edit locally and publish demo. Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension. - Infinitely deep tables of contents:
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