A variant of Steffensen’s method of fourth-order convergence and its applications

In this paper, a variant of Steffensen’s method of fourth-order convergence for solving nonlinear equations is suggested. Its error equation and asymptotic convergence constant are proven theoretically and demonstrated numerically. The derivative-free method only uses three evaluations of the function per iteration to achieve fourth-order convergence. Its applications on systems of nonlinear equations and boundary-value problems of nonlinear ODEs are showed as well in the numerical examples.