MATLAB Function Reference

roots - Polynomial roots

Syntax

r = roots(c)

Description

r = roots(c) returns a column vector whose elements are the roots of the polynomial c.

Row vector c contains the coefficients of a polynomial, ordered in descending powers. If c has n+1 components, the polynomial it represents is .

Remarks

Note the relationship of this function to p = poly(r), which returns a row vector whose elements are the coefficients of the polynomial. For vectors, roots and poly are inverse functions of each other, up to ordering, scaling, and roundoff error.

Examples

The polynomial is represented in MATLAB^® software as

p = [1 -6 -72 -27]

The roots of this polynomial are returned in a column vector by

r = roots(p)

r =
    12.1229
    -5.7345
    -0.3884

Algorithm

The algorithm simply involves computing the eigenvalues of the companion matrix:

A = diag(ones(n-1,1),-1);
A(1,:) = -c(2:n+1)./c(1);
eig(A)