AN EXPLORATION OF HOMOTOPY SOLVING IN MAPLE

Homotopy continuation methods find approximate solutions of a given system by a continuous deformation of the solutions of a related exactly solvable system. There has been much recent progress in the theory and implementation of such path following methods for polynomial systems. In particular, exactly solvable related systems can be given which enable the computation of all isolated roots of a given polynomial system. Extension of such methods to determine manifolds of solutions has also been recently achieved. This progress, and our own research on extending continuation methods to identifying missing constraints for systems of dierential equations, motivated us to implement higher order continuation methods in the computer algebra language Maple. By higher order, we refer to the iterative scheme used to solve for the roots of the homotopy equation at each step. We provide examples for which the higher order iterative scheme achieves a speed up when compared with the standard second order scheme. We also demonstrate how existing Maple numerical ODE solvers can be used to give a predictor only continuation method for solving polynomial systems. We apply homotopy continuation to determine the missing constraints in a system of nonlinear PDE, which is to our knowledge, the first published instance of such a calculation.