Biography
Bellman was born in 1920 in New York City, the son of Pearl (née Saffian) and John James Bellman, who ran a small grocery store on Bergen Street near Prospect Park in Brooklyn. His family were agnostic Jews, originating from Russia and Poland. Bellman completed his studies at Abraham Lincoln High School in 1937, and studied mathematics at Brooklyn College where he received a BA in 1941. 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 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 contributions to decision processes and control system theory, particularly the creation and application of dynamic programming". His key work is the Bellman equation.
Read more about this topic: Richard E. Bellman
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