Two new families of sixth-order methods for solving non-linear equations

In this paper, we developed two new families of sixth-order methods for solving simple roots of non-linear equations. Per iteration these methods require two evaluations of the function and two evaluations of the first-order derivatives, which implies that the efficiency indexes of our methods are 1.565. These methods have more advantages than Newton's method and other methods with the same convergence order, as shown in the illustration examples. Finally, using the developing methodology described in this paper, two new families of improvements of Jarratt method with sixth-order convergence are derived in a straightforward manner. Notice that Kou's method in [Jisheng Kou, Yitian Li, An improvement of the Jarratt method, Appl. Math. Comput. 189 (2007) 1816-1821] and Wang's method in [Xiuhua Wang, Jisheng Kou, Yitian Li, A variant of Jarratt method with sixth-order convergence, Appl. Math. Comput. 204 (2008) 14-19] are the special cases of the new improvements.