This is a very frank and detailed account by a leading and very active mathematician of the past decades whose contributions have had an important impact in those fields where mathematics is now an integral part. It starts from his early childhood just after the First World War to his present-day positions as professor of mathematics, electrical engineering and medicine at the USC, which in itself reflects on the diversity of interests and experiences gained through the turbulent years when American mathematics and sciences established themselves on the forefront. The story traces the tortuous path Bellman followed from Brooklyn College; the University of Wisconsin to Princeton during the war years; more than a decade with the RAND Corporation; with frequent views of more than just the academic circles, including his experiences at Los Alamos on the A-bomb project.Bellman gives highly personalised views of key personalities in mathematics, physics and other areas, and his motivations and the forces that helped shape dynamic programming and other new areas which emerged as consequences of fruitful applications of mathematics.

Dynamic Programming and Modern Control Theory

This is a very frank and detailed account by a leading and very active mathematician of the past decades whose contributions have had an important impact in those fields where mathematics is now an integral part. It starts from his early childhood just after the First World War to his present-day positions as professor of mathematics, electrical engineering and medicine at the USC, which in itself reflects on the diversity of interests and experiences gained through the turbulent years when American mathematics and sciences established themselves on the forefront. The story traces the tortuous path Bellman followed from Brooklyn College; the University of Wisconsin to Princeton during the war years; more than a decade with the RAND Corporation; with frequent views of more than just the academic circles, including his experiences at Los Alamos on the A-bomb project.Bellman gives highly personalised views of key personalities in mathematics, physics and other areas, and his motivations and the forces that helped shape dynamic programming and other new areas which emerged as consequences of fruitful applications of mathematics.

Suitable for advanced undergraduates and graduate students, this was the first English-language text to offer detailed coverage of boundedness, stability, and asymptotic behavior of linear and nonlinear differential equations. It remains a classic guide, featuring material from original research papers, including the author's own studies. 1953 edition.

Contributing Authors Include Angelo Miele, P. Dergarabedian, R. P. Ten Dyke, And Many Others.

Contributing Authors Include Angelo Miele, P. Dergarabedian, R. P. Ten Dyke, And Many Others.

This three-part graduate-level treatment begins with classical perturbation techniques, discussing the Lagrange expansion theorem, matrix exponential, invariant imbedding, and dynamic programming. The second part concentrates on equations, presenting renormalization techniques of Lindstedt and Shohat and averaging techniques by Bellman and Richardson. The concluding chapter focuses on second-order linear differential equations, illustrating applications of the WKB-Liouville method and asymptotic series. Exercises, comments, and an annotated bibliography follow each demonstration of technique. A course in intermediate calculus and a basic understanding of ordinary differential equations are prerequisites. 1966 ed. 7 figures.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1963.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1963.

Rapid advances in the physical and biological sciences and in related technologies have brought about equally farreaching changes in mathematical research. Focusing on control theory, invariant imbedding, dynamic programming, and quasilinearization, Mr. Bellman explores with ease and clarity the mathematical research problems arising from scientific questions in engineering, physics, biology, and medicine. Special attention is paid in these essays to the use of the digital computer in obtaining the numerical solution of numerical problems, its influence in the formulation of new and old scientific problems in new terms, and to some of the effects of the computer revolution on educational and social systems. The new opportunities for mathematical research presage, Bellman concludes, a renaissance of mathematics in human affairs by involving it closely in the problems of society.

An introduction to the mathematical theory of multistage decision processes, this text takes a "functional equation" approach to the discovery of optimum policies. Written by a leading developer of such policies, it presents a series of methods, uniqueness and existence theorems, and examples for solving the relevant equations. The text examines existence and uniqueness theorems, the optimal inventory equation, bottleneck problems in multistage production processes, a new formalism in the calculus of variation, strategies behind multistage games, and Markovian decision processes. Each chapter concludes with a problem set that Eric V. Denardo of Yale University, in his informative new introduction, calls "a rich lode of applications and research topics." 1957 edition. 37 figures.