This man coined a term to hide the theoretical nature of his research from Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson.
This man coined a term to hide the theoretical nature of his research from Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson. The continuous time generalization of this man's namesake "equation" is named for him, Hamilton, and Jacobi. The discrete case of that equation named for him sets today's V equal to today's objective function plus a discount factor times tomorrow's V, then solves using value function iteration. This man pointed out that the difficulty of finding an optimum grows exponentially with the number of variables in a "curse of dimensionality." He's the first namesake of an algorithm whose handling of negative edge weights makes it slower than Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm. For 10 points, what inventor of dynamic programming co-names a shortest path algorithm with Lester Ford?
This man coined a term to hide the theoretical nature of his research from Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson.
Richard Bellman