Editing Dynamic programming (section)

== History of the name ==
The term ''dynamic programming'' was originally used in the 1940s by [[Richard Bellman]] to describe the process of solving problems where one needs to find the best decisions one after another.  By 1953, he refined this to the modern meaning, referring specifically to nesting smaller decision problems inside larger decisions,<ref>Stuart Dreyfus. [https://web.archive.org/web/20050110161049/http://www.wu-wien.ac.at/usr/h99c/h9951826/bellman_dynprog.pdf "Richard Bellman on the birth of Dynamical Programming"].</ref>  and the field was thereafter recognized by the [[IEEE]] as a [[systems analysis]] and [[engineering]] topic.  Bellman's contribution is remembered in the name of the [[Bellman equation]], a central result of dynamic programming which restates an optimization problem in [[Recursion (computer science)|recursive]] form.

Bellman explains the reasoning behind the term ''dynamic programming'' in his autobiography, ''Eye of the Hurricane: An Autobiography'':

{{Blockquote
|text=I spent the Fall quarter (of 1950) at [[RAND Corporation|RAND]]. My first task was to find a name for multistage decision processes. An interesting question is, "Where did the name, dynamic programming, come from?" The 1950s were not good years for mathematical research. We had a very interesting gentleman in Washington named [[Charles Erwin Wilson|Wilson]]. He was Secretary of Defense, and he actually had a pathological fear and hatred of the word "research". I'm not using the term lightly; I'm using it precisely. His face would suffuse, he would turn red, and he would get violent if people used the term research in his presence. You can imagine how he felt, then, about the term mathematical. The RAND Corporation was employed by the Air Force, and the Air Force had Wilson as its boss, essentially. Hence, I felt I had to do something to shield Wilson and the Air Force from the fact that I was really doing mathematics inside the RAND Corporation. What title, what name, could I choose? In the first place I was interested in planning, in decision making, in thinking. But planning, is not a good word for various reasons. I decided therefore to use the word "programming". I wanted to get across the idea that this was dynamic, this was multistage, this was time-varying. I thought, let's kill two birds with one stone. Let's take a word that has an absolutely precise meaning, namely dynamic, in the classical physical sense. It also has a very interesting property as an adjective, and that is it's impossible to use the word dynamic in a pejorative sense. Try thinking of some combination that will possibly give it a pejorative meaning. It's impossible. Thus, I thought dynamic programming was a good name. It was something not even a Congressman could object to. So I used it as an umbrella for my activities.
|author=Richard Bellman
|source=''Eye of the Hurricane: An Autobiography'' (1984, page 159)
}}

The word ''dynamic'' was chosen by Bellman to capture the time-varying aspect of the problems, and because it sounded impressive.<ref name="Eddy">{{cite journal |last=Eddy |first=S. R. |author-link=Sean Eddy |title=What is Dynamic Programming? |journal=Nature Biotechnology |volume=22 |issue= 7|pages=909–910 |year=2004 |doi=10.1038/nbt0704-909 |pmid=15229554 |s2cid=5352062 }}</ref> The word ''programming'' referred to the use of the method to find an optimal ''program'', in the sense of a military schedule for training or logistics.  This usage is the same as that in the phrases ''[[linear programming]]'' and ''mathematical programming'', a synonym for [[mathematical optimization]].<ref>{{cite book |last1=Nocedal |first1=J. |last2=Wright |first2=S. J. |title=Numerical Optimization |url=https://archive.org/details/numericaloptimiz00noce_639 |url-access=limited |page=[https://archive.org/details/numericaloptimiz00noce_639/page/n21 9] |publisher=Springer |year=2006 |isbn=9780387303031 }}</ref>

The above explanation of the origin of the term may be inaccurate: According to Russell and Norvig, the above story "cannot be strictly true, because his first paper using the term (Bellman, 1952) appeared before Wilson became Secretary of Defense in 1953."<ref>{{cite book |last1=Russell |first1=S. |last2=Norvig |first2=P. |title=Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach |edition=3rd |publisher=Prentice Hall |year=2009 |isbn=978-0-13-207148-2 }}</ref> Also, [[Harold J. Kushner]] stated in a speech that, "On the other hand, when I asked [Bellman] the same question, he replied that he was trying to upstage [[George Dantzig|Dantzig's]] linear programming by adding dynamic. Perhaps both motivations were true."<ref>{{Cite web |date=2004-07-01 |title=Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award |url=http://a2c2.org/awards/richard-e-bellman-control-heritage-award-0 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20141019015133/http://a2c2.org/awards/richard-e-bellman-control-heritage-award/2004-00-00t000000/harold-j-kushner |archive-date=2014-10-19 |first=Harold J. |last=Kushner |author-link=Harold J. Kushner}}</ref>