Editors' Note: Richard Ernest Bellman was born in 1920. He attended Brooklyn College as an undergraduate and went on to graduate studies at Wisconsin at Madison for a master's and Princeton University, where he received his PhD in 1947, under the direction of Solomon Lefschetz. He spent some time at Stanford University and the University of Southern California, but his career was mainly at the Rand Corporation.

Though he originally worked in analytic number theory he moved into applied mathematics, specifically linear and nonlinear differential equations, stochastic processes and dynamic programming. He became one of the foremost applied mathematicians in the U.S., described in the National Academy's Memorial Tributes as “a towering figure among the contributors to modern control theory and systems analysis.…” He wrote many books, among them Introduction to Matrix Analysis (1960); Adaptive Control Processes (1961); Applied Dynamic Programming (with Stuart Dreyfus) (1962); Differential-Difference Equations (with Kenneth L. Cooke) (1963); Methods of Nonlinear Analysis (1970); and Partial Differential Equations: New Methods for Their Treatment and Solution (1985). In the New Mathematical Library of the MAA we find An Introduction to Inequalities (with Edwin Beckenbach) (1961). Shortly before his death, at the early age of 63, he wrote his autobiography, The Eye of the Hurricane (World Scientific, 1984).

Much honored during his lifetime, he won the Norbert Wiener Prize of the AMS and SIAM; the Dickson Prize from Carnegie-Mellon University; the John von Neumann Award of the Institute of Management Sciences and the Operations Research Society of America; and the Medal of Honor for his invention of dynamic programming, from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering.