Education
University of Cambridge.
mathematician university professor
University of Cambridge.
His mathematical contributions include quasi-Newton methods, particularly the Davidon-Fletcher-Powell formula and the Powell"s Symmetric Broyden formula, augmented Lagrangian function (also called Powell-Rockafellar penalty function), sequential quadratic programming method (also called as Wilson-Han-Powell method), trust region algorithms, conjugate direction method (also called Powell"s method), and radial basis function. He had been working on derivative-free optimization algorithms in recent years, the resultant algorithms including COBYLA, UOBYQA, NEWUOA, BOBYQA, and LINCOA. He was the author of numerous scientific papers and of several books, most notably Approximation Theory and Methods. He died on 19 April 2015.
National Academy of Sciences. Royal Society]
He was a founding member of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications and a founding Managing Editor of the Journal for Numerical Analysis. Powell was elected as a Foreign Member of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 2001 and as a Corresponding Fellow to the Australian Academy of Science in 2007.