A PL homotopy for finding all the roots of a polynomial

This paper presents a constructive method which gives, for any polynomialF(Z) of the degreen, approximate values of all the roots ofF(Z).. The point of the method is on the use of a piecewise linear function (Z, t) which approximates a homotopyH(Z, t) betweenF(Z) and a polynomialG(Z) of the degreen withn known simple roots. It is shown that the set of solutions to (Z, t) = 0 includesn distinct paths,m of which converges to a root ofF(Z) if and only if the root has the multiplicitym. Starting from givenn roots ofG(Z), a complementary pivot algorithm generates thosen paths.This work was supported by grants from Management Science Development Foundation and Takeda Science Foundation.