Book excerpt: Michael Powell is one of the world's foremost figures in numerical analysis. This volume, first published in 1997, is derived from invited talks given at a meeting celebrating his 60th birthday and, reflecting Powell's own achievements, focuses on innovative work in optimisation and in approximation theory. The individual papers have been written by leading authorities in their subjects and are a mix of expository articles and surveys. They have all been reviewed and edited to form a coherent volume for this important discipline within mathematics, with highly relevant applications throughout science and engineering.