Find a real root of a real function f(x) via bracketing.

Given a function f and a range [a .. b] such that f(a) and f(b) have opposite signs or at least one of them equals ±0, returns the value of x in the range which is closest to a root of f(x). If f(x) has more than one root in the range, one will be chosen arbitrarily. If f(x) returns NaN, NaN will be returned; otherwise, this algorithm is guaranteed to succeed.

Uses an algorithm based on TOMS748, which uses inverse cubic interpolation whenever possible, otherwise reverting to parabolic or secant interpolation. Compared to TOMS748, this implementation improves worst-case performance by a factor of more than 100, and typical performance by a factor of 2. For 80-bit reals, most problems require 8 to 15 calls to f(x) to achieve full machine precision. The worst-case performance (pathological cases) is approximately twice the number of bits.

References: "On Enclosing Simple Roots of Nonlinear Equations", G. Alefeld, F.A. Potra, Yixun Shi, Mathematics of Computation 61, pp733-744 (1993). Fortran code available from www.netlib.org as algorithm TOMS478.