SOLVING A POLYNOMIAL EQUATION - SOME HISTORY AND RECENT PROGRESS

The classical problem of solving an nth degree polynomial equation has substantially influenced the development of mathematics throughout th e centuries and still has several important applications to the theory and practice of present-day computing. We briefly recall the history of the algorithmic approach to this problem and then review some succe ssful solution algorithms. We end by outlining some algorithms of 1995 that solve this problem at a surprisingly low computational cost.