(Michael) Powell (of Harwell and Cambridge) invented several optimization 
methods.  You will need to give us a precise reference.
Powell is associated with earlier versions of the Nelder-Mead, CG and BFGS 
methods implemented in optim() but in each case different variants have 
best stood the course of time.
On Sun, 15 Jan 2006, Tolga Uzuner wrote:
> Has anyone implemented Powell's Method for minimisation in R ?
-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
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