1. Introduction
The main advantage of derivative-free methods is that a derivative-free method can be used for finding the solution of a non-differentiable nonlinear function 
. Compared to Newton’s method [
1], derivative-free iterative methods do not require derivative in iterations. Numerous derivative-free iterative methods for finding the solution of nonlinear systems 
 have been proposed, where 
. Traub [
2] proposed the well-known derivative-free iterative method
      
      where 
. 
 is the first-order divided difference operator, which is defined by [
3]
      
The error equation of the method in (1) is
      
      where 
 is the solution of 
, 
 and 
. By adding one new iterative step to the method in (1), Chicharro et al. [
4] designed the following iterative method with order three:   
      satisfying the error equation
      
Let us assume that 
 in (3) and (5); then, the order of the methods in (1) and (4) can be improved. Unfortunately, the solution 
 is unknown. Generally, we handle this problem by replacing the constant parameter 
V with a variable parameter 
. The method with variable parameter 
 is called method with memory. The variable parameter 
 is designed by using iterative sequences from the current and previous steps. Substituting the variable parameter 
 for constant parameter 
V in the method in (1), Ahmad et al. [
5] and Petković et al. [
6] designed some efficient multi-step derivative-free iterative methods with memory. In order to design a new iterative method with memory, Kurchatov [
7] obtained the following one-step method with memory:
      where 
 is called Kurchatov’s divided difference operator. Argyros et al. [
8,
9] studied the convergence properties of Kurchatov’s method (6) in the Banach space and proved that Kurchatov’s method is second-order convergent. Wang et al. [
10] and Cordero et al. [
11] presented some Kurchatov-type methods with memory by using Kurchatov’s divided difference operator.
Replacing 
V in (3) with 
, Chicharro et al. [
4] obtained the following method with memory:
      where 
 The method in (7) is called FM3 in Chicharro’s paper [
4]. Substituting 
 for the parameter 
V in (4), they obtained the following scheme with memory:
The method in (8) is called FM5 in Chicharro’s paper [
4]. They concluded that the convergence orders of the FM3 and FM5 methods were 3 and 5, respectively. However, their conclusions about convergence order were incorrect and the results of numerical experiment were inconsistent with their theoretical results. The  main reason of this mistake is that they wrongly used the following equation in the paper [
4]:
      where
      
For the iterative FM3 and FM5 methods, the error 
 is less than the error 
. So, Equation (
9) should be written as
      
Theorem 1. Let the nonlinear function  be sufficiently differentiable and  be a zero of F. Let us assume that the initial value  is close to η. Then, the FM3 and FM5 methods have convergence orders  and 4, respectively.
 Proof.  Let 
r and 
p be the convergence orders of the FM3 and FM5 methods, respectively. The error relation of FM3 can be written as
        
        where 
 is the asymptotic error constant. So,
        
By replacing 
 of (3) with (11), we obtain the error expression of the FM3 method.
        
The asymptotic error constants 
 in (13) and 
 in (14) do not affect the convergence order of the iterative method. By equating the appropriate exponents of 
 in (13) and (14), we have
        
By solving Equation (
15), we obtain the positive root 
 This implies that the order of the FM3 method is 
Similar to Equations (12) and (13), the error relation of the FM5 method can be given by
        
        and
        
By replacing 
 of (5) with (11), we obtain the error relation
        
From (17) and (18), we obtain
        
By solving Equation (
19), we obtain 
 and 
. The convergence order of iterative method should be positive, so 
 is discarded. This implies that the convergence order of the FM5 method is four.    □
 Theorem 1 obtains the true order of the FM3 and FM5 methods.
Remark 1. From the error Equation (5) of the iterative method in (4) without memory, we know that  and . Thus, the error  is less than the error . The FM5 method with memory improves the convergence order of the method in (4) by the variable parameter . By replacing  of (5) with (9), we obtain  This means that the error  of the FM5 method is less than  and  of FM5 method is less than . For the FM3 method with memory, we also obtain that  This means that the error  of the FM3 method is less than . Thus, we obtain the error Equation (11).  Inspired by the FM3 and FM5 methods, we propose three iterative methods with a novel variable parameter in the next section.
The structure of this paper is as follows: The design of two novel divided difference operators as the variable parameters of three derivative-free iterative methods with memory for solving nonlinear systems is presented in 
Section 2. Using the new Kurchatov-type divided difference, the new derivative-free iterative methods reached the orders 3, 
 and 5, respectively. In 
Section 3, the application of the proposed methods to solve the ODEs, PDEs, the standard nonlinear systems and the non-differentiable nonlinear systems is presented. In 
Section 4, the dynamical behavior of the presented method is studied for analyzing the stability of the presented methods. In 
Section 5, we give a short summary.
  2. Two New Kurchatov-Type Accelerating Derivative-Free Iterative Methods with Memory
In this section, two new first-order divided difference operators are used for constructing the variable parameter 
. Similar to Kurchatov’s first-order divided difference, we construct the following first-order divided differences
      
      and
      
We call (20) and (21) Kurchatov-type first-order divided differences.
Method 1: Using (20), we obtain .
By replacing 
 with 
 in Equations (10) and (11), we obtain
      
      where 
.
Method 2: Using (21), we obtain .
By replacing 
 with 
 in Equations (10) and (11), we obtain
      
      where 
.
By substituting (22) for 
 of the FM3 method, we obtain the following scheme with memory:
The convergence order of the proposed scheme (24) is given by the following theorem.
Theorem 2. Let  be a sufficiently differentiable function in an open neighborhood D and  be a zero of function F. Let us assume that the initial value  is close enough to η. Then, the convergence order of the iterative scheme in (24) is three.
 Proof.  From (22) and (24), we have
        
        and
        
By replacing 
V of (3) with (22),
        
By comparing (26) with (27), we know that 
 is less than 
 and 
 is less than 
. From (22), we obtain
        
From (27) and (28), we obtain
        
This implies that the method in (24) has order three.    □
 Remark 2. We note that the method in (24) and the FM3 method have the same computational costs with different convergence orders. Our method (24) has a higher convergence order than the FM3 method. So, the computational efficiency of the FM3 method is less than that of the method in (24).
By replacing  of the FM5 method with (22), we obtain the following scheme with memory: By replacing  of the FM5 method with (23), we obtain The convergence orders of the proposed schemes in (30) and (31) are given by the following result.
 Theorem 3. Let  be a sufficiently differentiable function in an open neighborhood D and  be a zero of function F. Let us assume that the initial value  is close enough to η. Then, the iterative methods in (30) and (31) have convergence orders  and 5, respectively.
 Proof.  Let 
. Using (22), we have
        
Using (5), (30) and (32), we obtain
        
By comparing (26) with (33), we know that 
 is more than 
 and 
 is more than 
. From (32), we obtain
        
        where 
 Let us assume that the sequence 
 generated by the iterative method satisfies
        
        where 
 and 
 is an asymptotic error constant.
From (33) and (34), we have
        
From (35) and (36), we obtain
        
        and
        
From (37) and (38), we have
        
        and
        
By letting 
, we obtain
        
        where 
 is a constant. By solving Equation (
41), we obtain 
. This implies that the convergence order of the method in (30) is 
.
From (
5) and (
23), we obtain
        
        and
        
This implies that the order of the method with memory in (31) is five.    □
 Remark 3. Theorem 3 shows that the convergence order of the method in (4) without memory is improved from three to five by using one accelerating parameter (23). The convergence orders of the methods in (30) and (31) are higher than that of the FM5 method. The computational efficiency index (CEI) [3] is defined by , where ρ is the convergence order and c is the computational cost of the iterative method. The methods in (30) and (31) and the FM5 method have different convergence orders with the same computational costs. We know that the computational efficiency of our methods shown in (30) and (31) is superior to that of the FM5 method.  Remark 4. The methods in (24) and (30) use the same accelerating parameter (22). In Theorems 2 and 3, we use the different error relations of the parameter (22). The main reason is that ( in (22) is less than  for the two-step method method in (24) and  in (22) is more than  for the three-step method in (30).
 Remark 5. In order to simplify calculation, the computational scheme of the method in (30) can be written as The computational scheme of the method in (31) can be written as The linear systems in (37) and (38) were solved by LU decomposition in numerical experiments.
   3. Numerical Results
The methods in (24), (30) and (31) were compared with Chicharro’s methods (4), FM3 and FM5, for solving ODEs, PDEs and standard nonlinear systems. All the experiments were carried by the Maple 14 computer algebra system (Digits: = 2048). The parameter  was the identity matrix. The solution was obtained by the stopping criterion .
Table 1, 
Table 2, 
Table 3, 
Table 4, 
Table 5 and 
Table 6 show the following information: ACOC [
12] is the approximated computational order of convergence, NIT (number of iterations) is the number of iterations, EVL is evaluation of error 
 at the last step, 
T is the CPU time and FU is function values at the last step. The iterative processes of the iterative methods are given by 
Figure 1, 
Figure 2, 
Figure 3, 
Figure 4 and 
Figure 5.
 Problem 1. The solution of problem 1 is  and the initial value is .
 Figure 1 shows that the method in (31) had higher accuracy than the other methods. The accuracy of the method in (24) was similar to that of the FM3 method for Problem 1.
 Problem 2. The solution of Problem 2 is  and the initial guess is 
 Figure 2 shows that the methods in (30) and (31) had higher accuracy than the other methods. The method in (30) and (31) had similar convergence behaviors for Problem 2. The accuracy of the method in (24) was similar to that of the FM3 method for Problem 2.
 Problem 3. Using the discretization method in this problem, we obtain For  we chose the initial value  and obtained the solution . The numerical results are shown in Table 3.  Figure 3 shows that our method, shown in (31), had higher accuracy than the other methods under the same number of iterations.
 Problem 4. The interval  was partitioned into n intervals with a step size of . Using the difference method to discrete the derivative, we obtainedand For , we chose the initial value  and obtained the solution  . The numerical results are shown in Table 4.  Problem 5. The solution is  and the initial value is .
 Problem 6. Heat conduction problem [15]: This problem was transformed into nonlinear systems. The step size for t was  and the step size for x was . Let , ,  and ; we obtained The numerical results are given in Table 6. The exact solution  of this problem is shown in Figure 6. The absolute value of error of the solution and approximate solution obtained using the method in (31) are shown in Figure 7 and Figure 8.    4. Dynamical Analysis
Recently, the dynamical analysis method has been applied to study the stability of the iterative method. Some basic concepts on complex dynamics can be found in references [
16,
17,
18,
19,
20,
21,
22,
23,
24]. For brevity, we omit these concepts in this section. If an iterative method has good stability, it must has good properties for solving simple nonlinear equations. So, we compared our methods with other methods for solving complex equations 
. The field 
 was divided into a grid of 
. If the initial point 
 did not converge to the zero of the function after 25 iterations, it was painted with black. The tolerance 
 was used in our programs. 
Table 7, 
Table 8, 
Table 9 and 
Table 10 show the computing time (Time) for drawing the dynamical planes and the percentage of points (POPs) which guaranteed the convergence to the roots of the complex equations 
.
Figure 9, 
Figure 10, 
Figure 11 and 
Figure 12 show that our method, shown in (24), is the most stable method and the stability of the method in (4) without memory is the worst among the tested methods.
 Table 7, 
Table 8, 
Table 9 and 
Table 10 show that, compared with other methods, the method in (24) had the highest percentage of points which guaranteed the convergence to the roots of the complex equations and the method in (31) costed the least computing time.
   5. Conclusions
In this paper, three Kurchatov-type accelerating iterative schemes with memory were obtained by using two novel Kurchatov-type divided difference operator. The new methods avoided the evaluation of the derivative. The orders of convergence of our methods, shown in (24), (30) and (31), are 3,  and 5, respectively. We also corrected the order of convergence of Chicharro’s methods, FM3 and FM5. In experimental application, our methods were applied to nonlinear ODEs and PDEs. The numerical results show that, compared with other methods, our methods, shown in (30) and (31), had higher computational accuracy. Dynamical planes were used to analyze the stability of the presented methods. It is worth noting that our method with memory, shown in (24), had better stability than the other methods in this paper. The stability of the method without memory in (4) was the worst. We can conclude that iterative methods with memory can effectively improve the stability of iterative methods without memory.