The story
Named after Italian–American electrical engineer Andrew Viterbi (1935–), who proposed it in 1967 as a decoding algorithm for convolutional codes over noisy digital communication links.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Viterbi algorithm
Today it means: A dynamic programming algorithm for finding the most likely sequence of hidden states (the Viterbi path) that results in a sequence of observed events. Full definition →