There is this excellent HN-recommended fiction called Red Plenty that dramatised the efforts on the other side of the Atlantic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8417882

> It seems really weird that control theory is in EE departments considering it's sooo much more mathematical than most EE subdisciplines except signals processing.

I agree, apparently Bellman's reasoning for calling dynamic programming what it is was because he needed grant funding during the Cold War days and was advised to give his mathematical theories a more "interesting" name.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_programming#History

The generalised form of the Bellman Equation (co-formulated by Kalman of the Kalman filters fame) to control theory and EE is in some ways what the Maximum Likelihood function is to ML.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton%E2%80%93Jacobi%E2%8...