David Blackwell
David Harold Blackwell (April 24, 1919 – July 8, 2010) was an American statistician and mathematician who made significant contributions to game theory, probability theory, information theory, and statistics. He is one of the eponyms of the Rao–Blackwell theorem. He was the first African American inducted into the National Academy of Sciences, the first black tenured faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley, and the seventh African American to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics. In 2012, President Obama posthumously awarded Dr. Blackwell the National Medal of Science. Blackwell was also a pioneer in textbook writing. He wrote  one of the first Bayesian statistics textbooks, his 1969 "Basic Statistics". By the time he retired, he had published over 90 papers and books on dynamic programming, game theory, and mathematical statistics. Early life and education. David Harold Blackwell was born on April 24, 1919, in Centralia, Illinois, to Mabel Johnson Blackwell, a full-time homemaker, and Grover Blackwell, an Illinois Central Railroad worker. He was the eldest of four children. Growing up in an integrated community, Blackwell attended "mixed" schools, where he distinguished himself in mathematics. During elementary school, his teachers promoted him beyond his grade level on two  occasions. It was in a high school geometry course, however, that his passion for math began. An exceptional student, Blackwell graduated high school in 1935 at the age of sixteen. Blackwell entered the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with the intent to study elementary school mathematics and become a teacher. He was a member of the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity. In 1938 he earned his bachelor's degree in mathematics and a master's degree in 1939, and was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy in mathematics in 1941 at the age of 22. His doctoral advisor was Joseph L.  Doob. At the time, Blackwell was the seventh African American to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics in the United States and the first at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Career and research. Postdoctoral study and early career. Blackwell completed one year of postdoctoral research as a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) at Princeton in 1941 after receiving a Rosenwald Fellowship. There he met John von Neumann, who asked Blackwell to discuss his Ph.D. thesis with him. Blackwell, who believed that von Neumann was just being polite and not genuinely interested in his work, did not  approach him until von Neumann himself asked him again a few months later. According to Blackwell, "He (von Neumann) listened to me talk about this rather obscure subject and in ten minutes he knew more about it than I did." While a postdoc at IAS, Blackwell was prevented from attending lectures or undertaking research at nearby Princeton University, which the IAS has historically collaborated with in research and scholarship activities, because of his race. Seeking a permanent position elsewhere, he wrote letters of application to 104 historically black colleges and universities in 1942, and received a total of only three  offers. He felt at the time that a black professor would be limited to teaching at black colleges. Having been highly recommended by his dissertation advisor Joseph L. Doob for a position at the University of California, Berkeley, he was interviewed by statistician Jerzy Neyman. While Neyman supported his appointment, Griffith C. Evans (the head of the mathematics department) whom at first agreed and furthermore convinced university president Robert Sproul that it was the correct decision, subsequently balked, citing the concerns of his wife. It was customary for Evans and his wife to invite the members of the department over  for dinner and "she was not going to have any darkie in her house." He was offered a post at Southern University at Baton Rouge, which he held in 1942–43, followed by a year as an Instructor at Clark College in Atlanta. Howard University. In 1944, Blackwell moved to Howard University and within three years was appointed full professor and head of the Mathematics Department. He remained at Howard until 1954. From 1948 to 1950, Blackwell spent his summers at RAND Corporation with Meyer A. Girshick and other mathematicians exploring the game theory of duels. In 1954 Girshick and Blackwell  published "Theory of Games and Statistical Decisions". Aside from von Neumann and Girshick, other Blackwell collaborators and mentors included Leonard J. Savage, Richard E. Bellman, and Nobel Laureate Kenneth J. Arrow. Acknowledged to be among the achievements of Blackwell was the bridging of topology and game theory via a game-theoretic proof of the Kuratowski Reduction Theorem. However, it is worth noting that Blackwell only briefly extended his research beyond zero-sum games to explore the "sure thing principle" as introduced by Jimmie Savage, primarily due the real-world societal implications of the mathematical result, particularly for nuclear disarmament at  the inception of the Cold War. University of California, Berkeley. Blackwell took a position at the University of California, Berkeley as a visiting professor in 1954, and was hired as a full professor in the newly created Department of Statistics in 1955. He became the Statistics department chair in 1957. He spent the rest of his career at UC Berkeley, retiring in 1988 at age 70, which at that time was the mandatory retirement age. Over the course of his career, he mentored over 60 students. Blackwell wrote one of the first Bayesian textbooks, his 1969 "Basic Statistics". It inspired  the 1995 textbook "Statistics: A Bayesian Perspective" by the biostatistician Donald Berry. Honors and awards. The Blackwell-Tapia prize is named in honor of David Blackwell and Richard A. Tapia. Legacy. The Mathematical Association of America's MathFest, in coordination with the National Association of Mathematicians, features an annual MAA-NAM David Blackwell Lecture. Blackwell offered the inaugural address in 1994; and subsequent lecturers are researchers who "exemplif[y] the spirit of Blackwell in both personal achievement and service to the mathematical community." The University of California, Berkeley named an undergraduate residence hall in his honor, named David Blackwell Hall. The  residence hall opened in Fall 2018. Blackwell made the following statement about his values and work in an 1983 interview for a project called "Mathematical People":Basically, I’m not interested in doing research and I never have been...I’m interested in understanding, which is quite a different thing. And often to understand something you have to work it out yourself because no one else has done it. Personal life and death. Blackwell married Annlizabeth Madison (1919–2006), a 1934 graduate of Spelman College, on December 27, 1944. They had eight children together. David Blackwell died of complications from a stroke on  July 8, 2010, at Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in Berkeley, California.