We expand the applicability of Halley's method for solving nonlinear equations in a Banach space setting. We assume the existence of the center-Lipschitz condition on the second Frechet-derivative of the operator involved instead of Lipschitz condition used extensively in the literature [1,2,4,5]. The center-Lipschitz condition is satisfied in many interesting cases, where the Lipschitz condition is not satisfied [3,4,6,7,13]. We show that the semi-local convergence theorem established in [X. B. Xu, Y. H. Ling, Semilocal convergence for Halley's method under weak Lipschitz condition, Appl. Math. Comput. 215 ( 2009) 3057-3067] is not true. A new semi-local convergence theorem is established for Halley's method under the same condition. Our results are illustrated using a nonlinear Hammerstein integral equation of the second kind where our convergence criteria are satisfied but convergence criteria in earlier studies such as [1,2] are not satisfied. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
