Michael James David Powell (29 July 193619 April 2015) was a British mathematician, who worked in the

Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics Department may refer to: * Departmentalization, division of a larger organization into parts with specific responsibility Government and military *Department (administrative division), a geographical and administrative division within a country, ...

(DAMTP) at the

University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is a public collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209 and granted a royal charter by Henry III in 1231, Cambridge is the world's third oldest surviving university and one of its most pr ...

Education and early life

Born in London, Powell was educated at

Frensham Heights School Frensham Heights School is an independent school and sixth form college located near Farnham, Surrey, England, run by the registered charity, Frensham Heights Educational Trust Ltd. It was founded in 1925 and formed as part of the movement for ...

and

Eastbourne College Eastbourne College is a co-educational independent school in the British public school tradition, for day and boarding pupils aged 13–18, in the town of Eastbourne on the south coast of England. The College's headmaster is Tom Lawson. Over ...

. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree followed by a

Doctor of Science Doctor of Science ( la, links=no, Scientiae Doctor), usually abbreviated Sc.D., D.Sc., S.D., or D.S., is an academic research degree awarded in a number of countries throughout the world. In some countries, "Doctor of Science" is the degree used f ...

(DSc) degree in 1979 at the

. see als
An Interview with M. J. D. Powell
by

Philip J. Davis Philip J. Davis (January 2, 1923 – March 14, 2018) was an American academic applied mathematician. Davis was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He was known for his work in numerical analysis and approximation theory, as well as his investigati ...

, 6 April 2005

Career and research

Powell was known for his extensive work in

numerical analysis Numerical analysis is the study of algorithms that use numerical approximation (as opposed to symbolic manipulations) for the problems of mathematical analysis (as distinguished from discrete mathematics). It is the study of numerical methods ...

, especially nonlinear optimisation and approximation. He was a founding member of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications and a founding Managing Editor of the ''Journal for Numerical Analysis''. His mathematical contributions include

quasi-Newton method Quasi-Newton methods are methods used to either find zeroes or local maxima and minima of functions, as an alternative to Newton's method. They can be used if the Jacobian or Hessian is unavailable or is too expensive to compute at every iteration. ...

s, particularly the Davidon-Fletcher-Powell formula and the Powell's Symmetric Broyden formula, augmented Lagrangian function (also called Powell-

Rockafellar Ralph Tyrrell Rockafellar (born February 10, 1935) is an American mathematician and one of the leading scholars in optimization theory and related fields of analysis and combinatorics. He is the author of four major books including the landmark ...

penalty function),

sequential quadratic programming Sequential quadratic programming (SQP) is an iterative method for constrained nonlinear optimization. SQP methods are used on mathematical problems for which the objective function and the constraints are twice continuously differentiable. SQP me ...

method (also called as Wilson-Han-Powell method),

trust region In mathematical optimization, a trust region is the subset of the region of the objective function that is approximated using a model function (often a quadratic). If an adequate model of the objective function is found within the trust region, the ...

algorithms (

Powell's dog leg method Powell's dog leg method, also called Powell's hybrid method, is an iterative optimisation algorithm for the solution of non-linear least squares problems, introduced in 1970 by Michael J. D. Powell.Powell (1970) Similarly to the Levenberg–Marquar ...

), conjugate direction method (also called Powell's method), and

radial basis function A radial basis function (RBF) is a real-valued function \varphi whose value depends only on the distance between the input and some fixed point, either the origin, so that \varphi(\mathbf) = \hat\varphi(\left\, \mathbf\right\, ), or some other fixed ...

. He had been working on

derivative-free optimization Derivative-free optimization is a discipline in mathematical optimization that does not use derivative information in the classical sense to find optimal solutions: Sometimes information about the derivative of the objective function ''f'' is unava ...

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''.

Awards and honours

Powell won several awards, including the George B. Dantzig Prize from the Mathematical Programming Society/ Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) and the

Naylor Prize Naylor may refer to: People * Bernie Naylor (1923–1993), Australian rules footballer * Bo Naylor (born 2000), Canadian baseball player * Brian Naylor (racing driver) (1923–1989), British racing driver * Brian Naylor (broadcaster) (1931–20 ...

from the London Mathematical Society. Powell was elected a

Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences Membership of the National Academy of Sciences is an award granted to scientists that the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) of the United States judges to have made “distinguished and continuing achievements in original research”. Membership i ...

of the United States in 2001 and as a corresponding fellow to the

Australian Academy of Science The Australian Academy of Science was founded in 1954 by a group of distinguished Australians, including Australian Fellows of the Royal Society of London. The first president was Sir Mark Oliphant. The academy is modelled after the Royal Soc ...

in 2007.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Powell, Michael James David 1936 births 2015 deaths Alumni of Peterhouse, Cambridge Fellows of Pembroke College, Cambridge Mathematicians from London Academic journal editors Cambridge mathematicians Fellows of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications Foreign associates of the National Academy of Sciences Fellows of the Australian Academy of Science People educated at Frensham Heights School People educated at Eastbourne College John Humphrey Plummer Professors