Bellman [l] has shown that the functional equation technique of dynamic programming leads to an algorithm for solving linear equations when the matrix is a Jacobi matrix. The purpose of this note is to show that the algo- rithm is essentially the same as Gaussian elimination. Let A be a symmetric N x N Jacobi matrix, i.e., a symmetric matrix for which uii = 0 of 1 i -j 1 2 2. If in addition we assume that A is positive definite, then the problem of obtaining a vector x for which