DAVID BLACKWELL

“Try everything and keep looking until you find something that you like. Don't worry about how much money it will give you. As long as you can make a living at it. The very important thing is to have job satisfaction everyday when you go to work”.

― David Blackwell

About David Blackwell

Born and raised in Illinois, David Blackwell was a pioneering statistician and game theorist. In addition to the monumental work that defined his career, Blackwell also fought and broke numerous racial barriers and was the first African American to be inducted into the National Academy of Sciences. Blackwell was known for his independent invention of dynamic programming, which is used today in finance and in various areas of science, including genome analysis.

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.

On October 3, 2014, President Obama awarded Dr. Blackwell with the National Medal of Science posthumously. The award was accepted by two of his children, Hugo Blackwell and Sara Blackwell Hunt.

Blackwell married Annlizabeth Madison, 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.