The Bellman-ford Algorithm and “distributed Bellman-ford”

In the spring of 2003, I began to wonder about the history of the Bellman-Ford algorithm [CLRS01] for finding shortest paths in a graph. In particular, I was interested in understanding when Bellman’s name and Ford’s name became jointly associated with the algorithm. To research these questions, I made trips to the BBN Technologies and MIT libraries, did Web searches, and sent emails to university professors who taught courses or wrote books on algorithms, parallel processing, or routing in networks. I didn’t find the source of the joint name in the several weeks before I grew tired of searching the massive literature on shortest path algorithms. However, I did learn a good bit, as described below.