Solution Approaches for Dynamic Optimization

* Variational Approach (from calculus of variations, which uses small changes to find minima or maxima of a function. Think of derivatives)
**Also, the sequential problem formulation? (so called because one chooses the entire sequence of choices).
* Optimal Control Theory
* Dynamic Programming/Recursive formulation:
**Transforms the dynamic problem into many static problems.
Questions:
* How is dynamic programming a solution approach from a dynamic optimization problem? I thought these were essentially acronyms.