In the 1940's and 1950's, Media and business types sometimes spoke of "Electric Charlie" and "Engine Charlie". This jargon arose because of two executives named "Charles Wilson". One was President of General Electric, so was nicknamed "Electric Charlie". The other was President of General Motors, so was nicknamed "Engine Charlie". This anecdote concerns the latter.

"Engine Charlie" was a marketing expert, which explained his rise to a Vice-Presidency of GM. But he thought that his greatest rival for the Presidency was another "Charles": Charles Kettering, who left his fortune to the foundation named for him, The Kettering Foundation, pioneering in cancer research. Among Kettering's many inventions were the "self-starter" (replaced cranking the auto} and leaded gasoline. One of Kettering's interests was understanding the chlorophyll process by which grass and leaves turn sunlight into energy and growing matter. Engine Charlie couldn't understood this, and it led him to sneer at Research and Development, saying, "Research is what you're doing when you don't know what you're doing." This attitude still dominates many American corporations: "You can buy R&D off the shelf, like everything else."

Engine Charlie was chosen by President Eisenhower to become Secretary of Defense, provoking another problem and afamous quotation. Various people in politics and the media thought he should divest himself of his considerable holdings of GM stock, arguing that this would tempt him to favor GM in buying equipment for the Armed Forces. But Engine Charlie refused to sell his stock or put it in escrow, saying, "What's good for General Motors is good for the country!"

It was this attitude that led to the naming of "Dynamic Programming", Bellman's great contribution of the applied mathematics of "Operations Research" and to the problems of R&D. Bellman was asked to deal with the problem of an optimal policy for a multistage decision process.

Bellman formulated a Principle of Optimality: An optimal policy has the property that, regardless of the decisions taken to enter a particular state in a particular stage, the remaining decisions made for leaving that stage must constitute an optimal policy.

The tactic for this strategy, was to start at the last state of the last stage of the entire multistage decision process, and work backwards, varying optimality by a system of algebraic equations.

(On a Website, found in the "Webring" hyperlinked by "Y'all.com", I have "Algebra Is Arithmetic Backwards", http://.../algfront.htm -- quoting Danish philosopher, Sören Kierkegaard :"Life can only be understood backwards, but must be lived forwards.")

Bellman not only solved an important general mathematics problem, but also one of diplomacy. He knew that Engine Charlie's bias against research would cut the funds for this project. So, Bellman cleverly chose the title, "Dynamic Programming", making Engine Charlie think it was a GOOD MARKETING campaign!

Bellman was so provoked by the failure of The Mathematics Establishment to support Applied Mathematics that he said, "95% of the mathematics departments of North America have opted out of civilization!"