A Memorial Page Dedicated to Late Professor M. J. D. Powell FRS (1936–2015)

Professor M. J. D. Powell passed away on Apr. 19th, 2015 at 6 am. “The end of an era has come”, as said by Professor John Dennis.

As one of Professor Powell's over 50 academic grandchildren (according to the Mathematics Genealogy Project, as of Apr. 2015), I dedicate this page to Professor Powell, a giant, a founding father, and my Grandpa. It will collect my memories about Professor Powell and related materials. Launched on Apr. 23, 2015 in Toulouse.

A memorial conference

Aug. 5–7, 2016, Beijing, China, International Conference on Numerical Analysis, Approximation and Optimization (ICNAAO 2016), organized by Professor Ya-xiang Yuan (Chinese Academy of Sciences)

Note: This conference is planned to take place once every ten years.

Bibliographies

Michael James David Powell. 29 July 1936–19 April 2015, M. D. Buhmann, R. Fletcher, A. Iserles, and Ph. L. Toint, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, volume 64, pages 341–366, 2018

宝藏数学家的优化人生, 2020 年 4 月 19 日

Professor Powell's publications

There is a page of Professor Powell on Google Scholar Citations. I hope it is useful for those who would like to have an overview of Professor Powell's work.

If you are looking for Professor Powell's 1967 paper “A method for nonlinear constraints in minimization problems”, you may send me an email (zaikunzhang [&] gmail.com). This influential paper seems not available on internet. I made a photocopy of the paper but cannot archive it here due to copyright issues.

Professor Powell's software

During his last days, Professor Powell kindly sent me the source code of his optimization software and authorized me to maintain it on the Software page. Now the software is also maintained at CCPForge by Professor Nick Gould and me. Please feel free to contact us in case of any questions on the software, including its usage, its code, and its algorithms.

PDFO provides cross-platform interfaces for using the derivative-free optimization solvers. It currently supports MATLAB and Python.

Interviews with Professor Powell

An Interview with M. J. D. Powell by Luís Nunes Vicente, June 14, 2003
An Interview with Michael J. D. Powell by Philip Davis, Apr. 6, 2005
An Interview with Professor Michael J. D. Powell by Xiaoling Sun, 2006

Photos of Professor Powell

Note: All the photos are linked to their addresses on the Internet. None of them is archived on this site.

Professor Powell's photo from DAMTP, Cambridge University [photo] [source]
Professor Powell at the Courant Institute (1965/66, New York) [photo] [source]
Professor Powell in New Zealand (1989) [photo] [source]
Professor Powell in Teotihuacan, Mexico (1992) [photo] [source]
Professor Powell at HERMIS’ 92 (Sept. 1992, Athens) [photo] [source]
Professor Powell's portrait by Henk van der Vorst (linocut 2011) [photo] [source]
Professor Powell at Chinese Academy of Sciences (Nov. 4, 2011, Beijing) [photo 1] [photo 2] [source]
Professor Powell and some of his Chinese academic descendants at ICNONLA 8 (Nov. 8, 2011, Xiamen) [photo] [source]
Professor Powell giving a presentation in Birmingham (Sept. 2012) [photo 1] [photo 2] [source]
Professor Powell at the banquet of the 25th Biennial Conference in Numerical Analysis (June 28, 2013, Glasgow) [photo] [source]
Professor Powell at the welcome reception of ICCOPT IV (July 28, 2013, Lisbon) [photo] [source]
Professor Powell and some of his academic descendants at ICCOPT IV, on the occasion of his 77th birthday (July 29, 2013, Lisbon) [photo] [source]
Professor Powell giving a presentation at ICCOPT IV (July 29, 2013, Lisbon) [photo] [source]

Miscellaneous

A GNU Octave/MATLAB script that draws a figure illustrating Professor Powell's dog-leg method [code] [figure]