David Harold Blackwell
April 24, 1919- July 8, 2010
FIRST AFRICAN AMERICAN MEMBER OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES.
Professor Emeritus of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley, and is one of the eponyms of the Rao–Blackwell theorem. Professor of Mathematics and Statistics, Emeritus
UC Berkeley
David Blackwell was born on April 24, 1919, in Centralia, Illinois. He entered the University of Illinois in 1935, and received his A.B. in 1938, his A.M. in 1939, and his Ph.D. in 1941, all in mathematics. He was a member of the faculty at Howard University from 1944 to 1954, and has been a Professor of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley, since that time. He was President of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 1955. He has also been Vice President of the American Statistical Association, the International Statistical Institute, and the American Mathematical Society, and President of the Bernoulli Society. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society and was awarded the von Neumann Theory Prize by the Operations Research Society of America and the Institute of Management Sciences in 1979. He has received honorary degrees from the University of Illinois, Michigan State University, Southern Illinois University, and Carnegie-Mellon University. The following conversation took place in his office at Berkeley one morning in October 1984.
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.
David was born in Centralia, Illinois to Grover Blackwell, a railway worker, and Mabel Blackwell, who raised the family’s four children. During his early years as stated in interviews back in the era of the 1900’s racism was very prevalent and schools were segregated. The academics for both were the same as he recollected. David did attend an all-integrated Elementary School. He accelerated his studies. His parents were hard-working and instilled in him pure limitless confidence with integrity.
David Blackwell entered the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1935 at the age of 16 excelled in his studies and achieved his Bachelor’s Degree in mathematics in 1938, his Masters’s Degree in 1939, and his Ph.D. in the field of mathematics in 1941. This historical accomplishment made him the seventh black to have achieved this level of education acquiring a degree in mathematics during that era. His thesis was “Properties of Markov Chains. As stated by David he learned to read by the fact his uncle owned a small grocery store where he had seeds for planting and would read each seed packaging and that his mother contributed to his reading capabilities. He also stated, “he completed his first novel at the age of six”.
Dr. David employment was in this order:
In 1941 David was awarded a Rosenwald Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. At Princeton as a fellow at from 1941- 1942. He was met with much opposition due to his race and the insecurity of the other factual members because of his intelligence. He left the position after his one year ended and went on to write application letters to Historically Black Colleges and Universities to seek employment.
He sent out hundreds of applications to black colleges and universities. He accepted the position of instructor at Southern University in Baton Rouge in 1942. The following year he moved on to an instructorship at Clark College, Atlanta.
He left that position after receiving a position at Howard University at the time the leading educational faculty for blacks. He taught mathematics and within three years was appointed full professor and head of the Mathematics Department. He remained at Howard until 1954. solidifying his reputation in the field while at the university he wrote 20 groundbreaking papers which were published in 1945 – 1947. Together C. R. Roa and David Blackwell created the ROA AND BLACKWELL this is a result that characterizes the transformation of an arbitrarily crude estimator into an estimator that is optimal by the mean-squared-error criterion or any of a variety of similar criteria. The Rao–Blackwell theorem states that if g(X) is any kind of estimator of a parameter θ, then the conditional expectation of g(X) given T(X), where T is a sufficient statistics is typically a better estimator of θ, and is never worse. Sometimes one can very easily construct a very crude estimator g(X), and then evaluate that conditional expected value to get an estimator that is in various senses optimal. The theorem is named after Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao and David Blackwell. The process of transforming an estimator using the Rao–Blackwell theorem is sometimes called Rao–Blackwellization. The transformed estimator is called the Rao–Blackwell estimator.
In 1940 in Game theory David Blackwell used the Theory mathematics of Bluffing as a consultant to the rand corporation where he created a theory of The Optimum moment for an advanced dualist to open fire
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 “exemplify [y] the spirit of Blackwell in both personal achievement and service to the mathematical community.”
The Blackwell-Tapia Prize is named in honor of David Blackwell and Richard A. Tapia.
The University of California, Berkeley named an undergraduate residence hall in his honor, named David Blackwell Hall. The residence hall opened in Fall 2018.
An educational book about his life titled David Blackwell and the Deadliest Duel was published in 2019.
Blackwell made the following statement about his values and work in a 1983 interview for a project called “Mathematical People”
Honors
In his lifetime, Blackwell received 12 honorary doctorates.
Invited Speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians, 1954
President of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, 1956
Elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), 1965
Elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS), 1968
President of the Bernoulli Society for Mathematical Statistics and Probability, 1975-1977
Honorary Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society (RSS) in 1976
Vice President of the American Statistical Association (ASA) in 1978
Awarded the John von Neumann Theory Prize in 1979
Awarded the R. A. Fisher Lectureship in 1986
Elected a member of the American Philosophical Society, 1990
Fellow of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, 2002
Awarded the National Medal of Science (posthumous), 2012