curse-of-dimensionality-coined-by-bellman-dynamic-programming

Summary

The phrase "curse of dimensionality" traces back to Bellman's work on sequential decision-making, not to modern statistics or machine learning. This matters because it anchors a challenge that now haunts every high-dimensional model in data science to its original setting: the practical impossibility of computing optimal plans when the number of variables grows, a problem Bellman hit head-on in operations research.