Efficient derivative-free variants of Hansen-Patrick's family with memory for solving nonlinear equations (Q501967)

New accurate and efficient higher-order derivative-free iterative methods with and without memory for solving nonlinear equations numerically are presented. The significant increase in the convergence speed of the proposed methods is attained without additional functional evaluations, which points to a very high computationally efficiency. In other words, the efficiency index of the proposed family with memory is \(E=7^{1/3}\approx 1.913\). Numerical experiments and the comparison of the existing robust methods are included to confirm the theoretical results and high computational efficiency.