Carathéodory on the road to the maximum principle (Q1946031)

The author gives a historically-oriented exposition of Carathéodory's work on the calculus of variations. Among the interesting topics in the paper are Carathéodory's use of what, 30 years later, became known as Bellman's equation. The author also discusses how close Carathéodory came to taking the road that led from the calculus of variations to modern optimal control theory about two decades before Pontryagin formulated his maximum principle.