Numerical Instability of Algebraic Rootfinding Methods

Emil Graf, Alex Townsend

Abstract: We demonstrate that the most popular variants of all common algebraic multidimensional rootfinding algorithms are unstable by analyzing the conditioning of subproblems that are constructed at intermediate steps. In particular, we give multidimensional polynomial systems for which the conditioning of a subproblem can be worse than the conditioning of the original problem by a factor that grows exponentially with the number of variables.