Extrapolating Solution Paths of Polynomial Homotopies towards Singularities with PHCpack and phcpy

Jan Verschelde and Kylash Viswanathan

Abstract:

PHCpack is a software package for polynomial homotopy continuation, which provides a robust path tracker [Telen, Van Barel, Verschelde, SISC 2020]. This tracker computes the radius of convergence of Newton's method, estimates the distance to the nearest path, and then applies Pad\'{e} approximants to predict the next point on the path. A priori step size control is less sensitive to finely tuned tolerances than a posteriori step size control, and is therefore robust. The Python interface phcpy is extended with a new step-by-step tracker and is applied to experiment with extrapolation methods to accurately locate the singular points at the end of solution paths.

Accepted by the 8th International Congress on Mathematical Software 2024