MINPACK, along with other similar libraries such as LINPACK and EISPACK, originated from the Mathematics and Computer Science Division Software (MCS) of Argonne National Laboratory.
Written by Jorge Moré, Burt Garbow, and Ken Hillstrom, MINPACK is free and designed to be highly portable, robust and reliable.
[1] Five algorithmic paths each include a core subroutine and a driver routine.
The algorithms proceed either from an analytic specification of the Jacobian matrix or directly from the problem functions.
The paths include facilities for systems of equations with a banded Jacobian matrix, for least-squares problems with a large amount of data, and for checking the consistency of the Jacobian matrix with the functions.