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 African American full professor (with tenure) at the University of California, Berkeley, and the seventh African American to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics. In 2012, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Blackwell the National Medal of Science.
David Blackwell | |
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Blackwell in 1999 | |
| Born | David Harold Blackwell April 24, 1919 |
| Died | July 8, 2010 (aged 91) Berkeley, California, U.S. |
| Education | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (BA, MA, PhD) |
| Known for | Rao–Blackwell theorem Blackwell channel Arbitrarily varying channel Games of imperfect information Dirichlet distribution Blackwell's informativeness theorem Bayesian statistics Mathematical economics Recursive economics Sequential analysis |
| Awards | Member of the National Academy of Sciences (1965) John von Neumann Theory Prize (1979) R. A. Fisher Lectureship (1986) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Probability Statistics Logic Game theory Dynamic programming |
| Institutions | University of California, Berkeley |
| Thesis | Some properties of Markoff chains (1941) |
| Doctoral advisor | Joseph Leo Doob |
| Doctoral students |
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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.