Wikipedia did not invent the term dynamic programming for that particular technique.  See:<p>"The term was originally used in the 1940s by Richard Bellman to describe the process of solving problems where one needs to find the best decisions one after another. By 1953, he had refined this to the modern meaning, which refers specifically to nesting smaller decision problems inside larger decisions,[1] and the field was thereafter recognized by the IEEE as a systems analysis and engineering topic. Bellman's contribution is remembered in the name of the Bellman equation, a central result of dynamic programming which restates an optimization problem in recursive form.<p>Originally the word "programming" in "dynamic programming" had no connection to computer programming, and instead came from the term "mathematical programming"[2] - a synonym for optimization. However, nowadays many optimization problems are best solved by writing a computer program that implements a dynamic programming algorithm, rather than carrying out hundreds of tedious calculations by hand. Some of the examples given below are illustrated using computer programs."<p>(Stolen from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_programming#History" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_programming#History</a>)