  Ground state energies and wave functions of quartic and pure quartic
oscillators are calculated by first casting the Schr\"{o}dinger equation into a
nonlinear Riccati form and then solving that nonlinear equation analytically in
the first iteration of the quasilinearization method (QLM). In the QLM the
nonlinear differential equation is solved by approximating the nonlinear terms
by a sequence of linear expressions. The QLM is iterative but not perturbative
and gives stable solutions to nonlinear problems without depending on the
existence of a smallness parameter. Our explicit analytic results are then
compared with exact numerical and also with WKB solutions and it is found that
our ground state wave functions, using a range of small to large coupling
constants, yield a precision of between 0.1 and 1 percent and are more accurate
than WKB solutions by two to three orders of magnitude. In addition, our QLM
wave functions are devoid of unphysical turning point singularities and thus
allow one to make analytical estimates of how variation of the oscillator
parameters affects physical systems that can be described by the quartic and
pure quartic oscillators.
