The vault's own Isaacs notes already carry two different senses of 'first' against Pontryagin, structurally mirroring Werbos's 1988/1993 divergence

rufus-isaacslev-pontryaginpaul-werbospriority-disputedocumentary-source-criticismhistory-of-mlhistory-of-mathematics

claim-isaacs-1951-rand-paper-precursors-maximum-principle rests on M. H. Breitner's 2005 JOTA historical study, which states Isaacs's first RAND paper (1951) "already included rudimentary precursors of the maximum principle, dynamic programming, and backward analysis" — five years before Pontryagin's 1956 Doklady announcement (Boltyanskii, Gamkrelidze, Pontryagin, "On the Theory of Optimal Processes," Doklady Akademii Nauk SSSR 110, 1956). claim-isaacs-1965-preface-recounts-missing-pontryagin-priority-by-days rests on Isaacs's own preface, which frames the same relationship as a near-miss measured in days, against Pontryagin's book (not the 1956 Doklady note — the fuller The Mathematical Theory of Optimal Processes, Russian 1961/English translation 1962).

These two accounts are not contradictory: one concerns rudimentary precursor ideas in an unpublished-outside-RAND report, the other concerns a completed, publishable systematic theory. But read side by side, the vault's own two Isaacs claims exhibit exactly the pattern already named for Werbos: two accounts, by or about the same man, naming different margins (five years; a few days) and different rivals' documents (the 1956 Doklady announcement; the 1961/62 book) as the measure of "first," for different senses of "first." Neither existing Isaacs note had previously been checked against the other for this; this is the first synthesis to put them side by side.