Abstract. In this paper, we show that for a symmetric tensor, its best symmetric rank-1 approximation is its best rank-1 approximation. Based on this result, a positive lower bound for the best rank-1 approximation ratio of a symmetric tensor is given. Furthermore, a higher order polynomial spherical optimization problem can be reformulated as a multilinear spherical optimization problem. Then, we present a modified power algorithm for solving the homogeneous polynomial spherical optimization problem. Numerical results are presented, illustrating the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.Key words. symmetric tensor, the best rank-1 approximation, the best symmetric rank-1 approximation, power algorithm , i 2 , . . . , i m ). Symmetric tensors arise in higher order derivatives of smooth functions, moments, and cumulants of random vectors and have wide applications in signal and image processing, blind source separation (BSS), statistics, investment science, and so on; see [1,8,17,18,26] and references therein.A tensor is said to be rank-1 if it can be expressed as an outer product of a number of vectors. Specifically, if these vectors are all equal, then the tensor is called a symmetric rank-1 tensor. Given an m-order n-dimensional square tensor A, rank-1 tensor B = λx(1) · · · x (m) is said to be its best rank-1 approximation if it minimizes the least-squares cost function A − B F over the manifold of rank-1 tensors. Similarly, symmetric rank-1 tensor C = μx m is said to be the best symmetric rank-1 approximation if it minimizes the least-squares cost function A − C F over the manifold of symmetric rank-1 tensors. From optimization theory, B and C can be obtained by solving the optimization problems