1. Introduction
Analytical methods have made a comeback in research methodology after taking a backseat to the numerical techniques
for the latter half of the preceding century. The advantages of analytical methods are manifold, the main being that they give
a much better insight than the numbers crunched by a computer using a purely numerical algorithm. Two of the analytical
methods of recent vintage, namely, the homotopy perturbation method (HPM) and the homotopy analysis method (HAM),
have attracted special attention from researchers as they are both flexible in applying and give sufficiently accurate results
with modest effort. Both the methods are based upon introduction of a homotopy parameter p which takes the values from
zero to one. When p = 0, the problem under study takes a sufficiently simple form which admits a closed form analytical
solution. As p is increased and finally takes the value one, the solution to the original problem is recovered, the nice feature
is that it is being done entirely analytically.