The Richard Bellman honorary issue

The Richard Bellman Ronorary Issue This issue, which starts with the first of our new series of introductory reviews, is dedicated to the founding editor, Richard Bellman. With this issue we honor him for his many and wide-ranging contributions to mathematical biology, and to applied mathematics in general. Richard Bellman, Dick to his friends. did his undergraduate work at Brooklyn College obtaining his BA in 1941. There he published his first paper. “On Symmetric Means” which appeared in the Brooklyn College Mathematical Mirror in 1940. He received his Masters degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1943, and went on to Princeton where he received his Ph.D. in 1946. After short stints as Assistant Professor and Associate Professor of Mathematics at Princeton and Stanford respectively, Bellman joined the RAND Corporation in 1953. The major part of the work he has published so far appeared in the years at RAND, 1953-1965. In 1965 he joined the University of Southern California as a Professor of Mathematics, Electrical Engineering and Medicine. There he organized a research and training program in applied mathematics which emphasized applications to the biomedical areas. Dick Bellman’s research output has been and continues to be phenomenal. He has over 500 published research papers, 30 books and seven monographs. He is known for his contributions to the basic theory of differential equations and his first book. Stability Theory of Differentid Equarions (McGraw-Hill, 1953) remains one of the source books on stability theory. He developed a simple but important idea in optimization which led to the theory of dynamic programming. His first publication on dynamic programming appeared in 1952 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This, expanded and with applications included. became the subject of his second book. Dynamic Programming (Princeton University Press, 1957). Dynamic programming has become widely known both for its basic theory and for its applications to optimization problems in many different fields. His continued interest in problems of optimization and control has led to many contributions to modern mathematical control theory. For the last 15 years or so, he has become ever more interested in problems in the biological and health sciences. and has contributed to basic theory in chemotherapy, pharmacokinetics and radiation therapy as well as to computer simulation in these fields. His work has not gone unrecognized. He received the first Norbert Wiener Prize in Applied Mathematics and the first Dickson Prize from Carnegie-Mellon University in 175

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1970. the ALZA Award in Pharmacokinetics in 1972, and the John Von Neumann Theory Award in 1976. It takes more than just ability, with which Dick Bellman is well supplied, to maintain a productivity such as his. Contributing to it are his wide range of interests, a special interest in the problems of the real world and in methods that work to give solutions. Above all, Dick Bellman works well with others. He collaborates in what must be close to an optimal fashion, doing what he does best in mathematics and. at the same time, stimulating his collaborators to contribute their best. He keeps many projects going at once, and does not waste time bulldogging a recalcitrant problem-if a problem doesn’t appear to resolve, go on to another problem and return to this one later on. Dick Bellman’s contributions in research are matched by his involvement in teaching and the dissemination of knowledge. Over the past ten years at USC he has had a series of graduate students who have done their thesis research on applications of mathematics in the biological and health sciences. They have had an opportunity to interact with a steady stream of visiting scientists, who come to work with Bellman for various periods, especially during the summer months. To this we must add the extensive lecturing Bellman has done up to his operation in 1974, from which he is still recovering, as well as his work in stimulating the publication of studies in many applied areas in his capacity as Editor of the Journuf of Muthemuticui Ana(?/sis und Applications. and of Mathematical Biosciences and of two series of books. Muthemutics in Science and Engineering (Academic Press), and Modern AnQtic und Computational Methods in Science und Muthemu/ics (American Elsevier). J. A. JACQUEZ