Cha đẻ của kỹ thuật dynamic prorgramming (quy hoạch động) là Richard Bellman. Hồi đầu những năm 50, Bellman làm tư vấn cho RAND Corp, một trong những think tank có ảnh hưởng cực lớn của quân đội Mỹ. (Lý thuyết game, quy hoạch tuyến tính, và nhiều nhánh khác của toán học, kinh tế học hiện đại có phần gốc gác từ RAND.) Hồi đó Bellman đang nghiên cứu về planning, multistage decision process, … và ông khám ra kỹ thuật quy hoạch động. Tuy nhiên, hồi đó bộ trưởng bộ quốc phòng Mỹ là Charles Wilson rất ghét cụm từ “nghiên cứu”, đặc biệt là “nghiên cứu toán học”. Wilson vốn là một kỹ sư giỏi, nhưng sau đó đi làm business (salesman), lên đến tổng giám đốc của General Motors. Trong quyển tiểu sử tự thuật của mình, Bellman giải thích tại sao ông chọn tên “dynamic programming” như sau:
I spent the Fall quarter (of 1950) at RAND. My first task was to find a name for multistage decision processes. “An interesting question is, ‘Where did the name, dynamic programming, came from?’ The 1950s were not good years for mathematical research. We had a very interesting gentlemen in Washington named Wilson. He was Secretary of Defense, and he actually had a pathological fear and hatred of the word, research. I’m not using the term lightly; I’m using it precisely. His face would suffuse, he would turn red, and he would get violent if people used the term, research, in his presence. You can imagine how he felt, about the term, mathematical. The RAND Corporation was employed by the Air Force, and the Air Force had Wilson as its boss, essentially. Hence, I felt I had to do something to shield Wilson and the Air Force from the fact that I was really doing mathematics inside the RAND Corporation. What title, what name, could I choose? In the first place I was interested in planning, in decision making, in thinking. But planning, is not a good word for various reasons. I decided therefore to use the word, ‘programming.’ I wanted to get across the idea that this was dynamic, this was multistage, this was time-varying–I thought, let’s kill two birds with one stone. Let’s take a word that has an absolutely precise meaning, namely dynamic, in the classical physical sense. It also has a very interesting property as an adjective, and that is it’s impossible to use the word, dynamic, in a pejorative sense. Try thinking of some combination that will possibly give it a pejorative meaning. It’s impossible. Thus, I thought dynamic programming was a good name. It was something not even a Congressmann could object to. So I used it as an umbrella for my activities