The Laguerre method for finding the zeros of polynomials

In both the analysis and the design of linear networks, a commonly occurring task is that of locating the zeros of a polynomial. Among the many methods available for doing this, the one due to Laguerre has some remarkable properties that include a guarantee of convergence for polynomials with only real zeros. Moreover, for simple zeros, real or complex, this convergence is cubic. In practice, the method has proved very successful. Since this method is not widely known, the author explains its properties in an elementary fashion