Richard Bellman

Richard Ernest Bellman (August 26, 1920 – March 19, 1984) was an applied mathematician, celebrated for his invention of dynamic programming in 1953, and important contributions in other fields of mathematics. Bellman was born in 1920 in New York City, where his father John James Bellman ran a small grocery store on Bergen Street near Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Bellman completed high school at the Abraham Lincoln High School (New York) in 1937, an... more

Richard Ernest Bellman (August 26, 1920 – March 19, 1984) was an applied mathematician, celebrated for his invention of dynamic programming in 1953, and important contributions in other fields of mathematics. Bellman was born in 1920 in New York City, where his father John James Bellman ran a small grocery store on Bergen Street near Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Bellman completed high school at the Abraham Lincoln High School (New York) in 1937, and studied mathematics at Brooklyn College where he received a BA in 1941, and later a MA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. During World War II he worked for a Theoretical Physics Division group in Los Alamos. In 1946 he received his Ph.D. at Princeton under the supervision of Solomon Lefschetz. He was a professor at the University of Southern California, a Fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1975), and a member of the National Academy of Engineering (1977). He was awarded the IEEE Medal of Honor in 1979, "For... less