High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! In numerical analysis, Wilkinson's polynomial is a specific polynomial which was used by James H. Wilkinson in 1963 to illustrate a difficulty when finding the root of a polynomial: the location of the roots can be very sensitive to perturbations in the coefficients of the polynomial. It is a natural question in numerical analysis to ask whether the problem of fin ...Full description
High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! In numerical analysis, Wilkinson's polynomial is a specific polynomial which was used by James H. Wilkinson in 1963 to illustrate a difficulty when finding the root of a polynomial: the location of the roots can be very sensitive to perturbations in the coefficients of the polynomial. It is a natural question in numerical analysis to ask whether the problem of finding the roots of p from the coefficients ci is well-conditioned. That is, we hope that a small change in the coefficients will lead to a small change in the roots. Unfortunately, that is not the case here.