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.[8]
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.[9] He was the eldest of four children[8] with two brothers, J. W. and Joseph, and one sister, Elizabeth. 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 mathematics began.[10] An exceptional student, Blackwell graduated high school in 1935 at the age of sixteen.[9]
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 Alpha Phi Alpha, a black fraternity that housed him for his full six years as a student. He earned his bachelor's degree in mathematics in three years in 1938 and, a year later, a master's degree in 1939. He was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy in mathematics in 1941[2] at the age of 22.[9][11][12] 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. His doctoral thesis was on Markov chains.
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,[13] because of his race.[12]
From left to right: Abdulalim Shabazz, David Blackwell, and J. Ernest Wilkins Jr. at the Conference for African American Researchers in the Mathematical Sciences in June 1995.
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.[14] 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. Neyman supported his appointment, and Griffith C. Evans, the head of the mathematics department, at first agreed and even convinced university president Robert Sproul that it was the correct decision, only to subsequently balk, 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."[15][16]
He was offered a post at Southern University at Baton Rouge, which he held in from 1942 to 1943, followed by a year as an Instructor at Clark College in Atlanta.
Blackwell joined the Mathematics Department at Howard University in 1944. When he joined, he was one of four faculty members and within three years he was appointed full professor and head of the department.[12] He remained at Howard until 1954. In 1947, while at Howard, Blackwell published the paper "Conditional Expectation and Unbiased Sequential Estimation", which outlined a technique that later became known as the Rao-Blackwell theorem.[17] The theorem provides a method for improving statistical estimates by potentially reducing their mean squared error.
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.
He spent the rest of his career at UC Berkeley, retiring in 1988[12][21] at age 70, which at that time was the mandatory retirement age. Over the course of his career, he mentored over 60 students.[2]
Blackwell married Annlizabeth Madison, a 1934 graduate of Spelman College, on December 27, 1944.[8] They had eight children together,[28] three sons and five daughters: Ann, Julia, David, Ruth, Grover, Vera, Hugo, and Sara.
The Mathematical Association of America's MathFest, in coordination with the National Association of Mathematicians, features an annual MAA-NAM David Blackwell Lecture.[7] 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."[35]
The University of California, Berkeley named an undergraduate residence hall in his honor, named David Blackwell Hall. The residence hall opened in Fall 2018.[36]
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 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.[12]
In March 2024, Nvidia announced its BlackwellGPU architecture, named in honour of David Blackwell.[37][38]
Arrow, K. J.; Blackwell, David; Girshick, M. A. (1949). "Bayes and Minimax Solutions of Sequential Decision Problems". Econometrica. 17 (3/4): 213–244.
Blackwell, David; Koopmans, Lambert (1957). "On the Identifiability Problem for Functions of Finite Markov Chains". The Annals of Mathematical Statistics. 28 (4): 1011–1015.
^Albers, Donald J. (2008). "David Blackwell". In Albers, Donald J.; Alexanderson, Gerald L. (eds.). Mathematical People: Profiles and Interviews (2nd ed.). A K Peters. ISBN978-1-56881-340-0.
^Blackwell, David; Girshick, M. A. (1954). Theory of Games and Statistical Decisions. New York: John Wiley & Sons. ISBN0-486-63831-6.
^Arrow, K. J., D. Blackwell and M. A. Girshick “Bayes and Minimax Solutions of Sequential Decision Problems” Econometrica Vol. 17, No. 3/4 (Jul. - Oct., 1949), pp. 213-244.
^Pearl, Judea (December 2015). "The sure-thing principle" (PDF). UCLA Cognitive Systems Laboratory, Technical Report R-466.
^Savage, L. J. (1954), The foundations of statistics. John Wiley & Sons Inc., New York.
^7. Blyth, C. (1972). "On Simpson's paradox and the sure-thing principle". Journal of the American Statistical Association. 67 (338): 364–366. 10.2307/2284382. JSTOR 2284382.
