Biography of Richard Ernest Bellman

Richard Ernest Bellman was born in New York City, August 26, 1920 and die one day of March 19, 1984. Was an American applied mathematician, celebrated for his invention of dynamic programming in 1953, and important contributions in other fields of mathematics.

            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).

            His father was John James Bellman and his mother was Pearl Saffian. Both sides of the family came from Jewish descent, with both John Bellman's father having emigrated from Russia and Pearl Saffian's father having emigrated from Poland. Despite the Jewish descent, the family that Richard was born into were agnostics.

            Richard attended Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn where he represented his school on the mathematics team and in his final year was rewarded with achieving the top rank among all New York school pupils. After High School Bellman entered the City College of New York in January 1937. At this stage he had made up his mind to become a theoretical physicist and he took courses at the College with this in mind. In 1938 he moved from City College to Brooklyn College where he now decided to make mathematics his main area of study. He represented Brooklyn College in the three man team in the Lowell Putman mathematics competition in his final two years at Brooklyn College. He graduated with a B.A. in mathematics in 1941 and in September of that year he entered Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore to undertake postgraduate studies.

            He later earned an 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. From 1949 Bellman worked for many years at RAND corporation and it was during this time that he developed dynamic programming.

            He was awarded the IEEE Medal of Honor in 1979, "for contributions to decision processes and control system theory, particularly the creation and application of dynamic programming". His key work is the Bellman equation.

            A Bellman equation, also known as a dynamic programming equation, is a necessary condition for optimality associated with the mathematical optimization method known as dynamic programming. Almost any problem which can be solved using optimal control theory can also be solved by analyzing the appropriate Bellman equation. The Bellman equation was first applied to engineering control theory and to other topics in applied mathematics, and subsequently became an important tool in economic theory.

Bibliography:

"Richard Ernest Bellman." Bellman Biography. Web. 19 Feb. 2012. <http://www.gap-system.org/~history/Biographies/Bellman.html>.

"C. West Churchman." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 19 Feb. 2012. Web. 19 Feb. 2012. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._West_Churchman>.