Zusammenfassung: In mathematics, the age-length key method is an estimating method for the ratio of each distribution in a mixture of distributions. Although the maximum likelihood method is the principle of this estimation, this model is a nonlinear model with a restrictive condition. At first, Hasselblad solved this model by using a new iteration method with a computer. Although his method was regarded as the steepest descent method or EM algorithm, it is proved to be an application of Lagrange's indeterminate multiplier method to the iteration method. Nowadays, there are other useful algorithms of optimization, especially Marquardt's method, for this estimation.