Richard Bellman

Richard Ernest Bellman (26 August 1920 to 19 March 1984) was an American applied mathematician who introduced dynamic programming in 1953 and made important contributions in other fields of mathematics, such as biomathematics. He founded the leading biomathematical journal Mathematical Biosciences, as well as the Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications. He was born in New York City to non-practising Jewish parents of Polish and Russian descent who ran a small grocery store in Brooklyn, attended Abraham Lincoln High School, studied mathematics at Brooklyn College, earned a BA in 1941 and an MA from the University of Wisconsin, worked during World War II in a Theoretical Physics Division group at Los Alamos, and in 1946 received his Ph.D. at Princeton University.