hi all, rev. 3209 contains changes to optimize.brent (I implemented the brent class in the way proposed by Alan Isaac + 4 tests related to brent were added). So I guess the ticket 285 should be closed. Also, I have changed some docstrings related to brent and some other funcs (): If bracket is two numbers *(a,c)* then they are assumed to be a starting interval for a downhill bracket search (see bracket);* it doesn't always mean that obtained solution will satisfy a<=x<=c*. (As for me some weeks ago I was surprised to obtain solution from outside of the (a,c) interval, MATLAB has only one func fminbound that yields solution strictly from the given interval, but some scipy.optimize line-search routines use strictly the interval and some other, like brent, use only as starting interval for bracket search, and this is not properly descriebed in documentation). Regards, D.