Blackwell, David

David Blackwell, in full David Harold Blackwell, (born April 24, 1919, Centralia, Illinois, U.S.—died July 8, 2010, Berkeley, California), American statistician and mathematician who made significant contributions to game theory, probability theory, information theory, and Bayesian statistics and who broke racial barriers when he was named (1965) the first African American member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

Blackwell, the son of a railroad worker, taught himself to read as a boy. He initially planned to become an elementary school teacher, and at age 16 he entered the University of Illinois, where his early aptitude for mathematics blossomed. He earned bachelor’s (1938), master’s (1939), and doctorate (1941) degrees, and, after a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, he briefly worked for the U.S. Office of Price Administration.

Blackwell sent applications to numerous African American colleges, and he worked as an instructor at Southern University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Clark College, Atlanta, before receiving an appointment in the mathematics department at Howard University, Washington, D.C., in 1944; he became head of the department in 1947. In 1954 Blackwell was invited to join the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, where he became that institution’s first African American tenured professor. He also served as chairman (1957–61) of the statistics department there. He was additionally appointed professor of mathematics in 1973, and he retired in 1988. While working (1948–50) as a consultant at the RAND Corporation, Blackwell applied game theory to military situations by analyzing the optimum timing of theoretical armed duelists.

Blackwell was known for his independent development of dynamic programming. His importance can be gauged by the theorems that bear his name, including the Blackwell renewal theorem, used in engineering, and the Rao-Blackwell theorem in statistics. His many publications included the classic Theory of Games and Statistical Decisions (1954; with M.A. Girshick) and Basic Statistics (1969). Blackwell was elected (1976) an honorary fellow of the Royal Statistical Society and won the John von Neumann Theory Prize in 1979.