Charles George Broyden (3 February 1933 – 20 May 2011) was a mathematician who specialized in optimization problems and numerical linear algebra.
[1][2][3][4] While a physicist working at English Electric Company from 1961–1965, he adapted the Davidon–Fletcher–Powell formula to solving some nonlinear systems of equations that he was working with, leading to his widely cited 1965 paper, "A class of methods for solving nonlinear simultaneous equations".
[3] He later became a senior lecturer at University of Essex from 1967–1970,[3] where he independently discovered the Broyden–Fletcher–Goldfarb–Shanno (BFGS) method.
[1] The BFGS method has then become a key technique in solving nonlinear optimization problems.
In later years, he began focusing on numerical linear algebra, in particular conjugate gradient methods and their taxonomy.