Formatted for mobile:

According to Richard Bellman, who came up with the name:

An interesting question is, Where did the name, dynamic programming, come from?

The 1950s were not good years for mathematical research. We had a very interesting gentleman in Washington named Wilson. He was Secretary of Defense, and he actually had a pathological fear and hatred of the word research. [...] 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"

[...] 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 Congressman could object to.

Thanks :-). This comes up so often! Is there a reason HN doesn't use a more mobile-friendly format for preformatted text?

The feature is intended for code, note block quotes. Auto line wraps would be less than helpful.

Problem is when some text copied and pasted here incidentally starts paragraphs with two or more spaces. And maybe the the commenter does not know why it formats weirdly.

Yeah, but code blocks are still limited in width on mobile. At least let them flow to the edge of the screen before scrolling.

Thanks. (I have now looked up the correct way to quote).

> We had a very interesting gentleman in Washington named Wilson. He was Secretary of Defense, and he actually had a pathological fear and hatred of the word research.

Amusingly, Engine Charlie [1] was an engineer. You'd think an engineer understands the value of research :)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Erwin_Wilson