David Blackwell

Brief Biography

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 enrolled at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign at age sixteen and received all three of his degrees by age twenty-two. Throughout his entire education and early academic career, Blackwell faced disabling discrimination. He was denied a position when he originally applied to the University of California, Berkeley on account of his race. He therefore spent his first twelve years as an academic at historically black colleges and universities, spending the majority of that period at Howard University. When the Statistics Department was established at the University of California, Berkeley in 1955, Blackwell was invited to join what was becoming one of the world’s strongest faculties in statistics.

Although Blackwell was a member of the Statistics Department, according to Robert Oliver - who was Chairman of the Berkeley Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research (1964-69) and later Director of the Operations Research Center there, Blackwell "was deeply interested and involved in  developing the new Operations Research Department in the Engineering College; David was the only new 'Bayesian' in the large department of classical statistics headed by Jerzy Neyman."  

Prior to teaching, Blackwell held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS) in Princeton. He caught the attention of many scientific and OR professionals including John von Neumann, who was interested in Blackwell’s dissertation, Properties of Markov Chains. Blackwell left IAS after being excluded from lectures and research opportunities at nearby Princeton University.

In 1979, Blackwell received the John von Neumann Theory Prize for his work in developing the subject of Markovian decision processes and establishing the mathematical footing for the theory of dynamic programming. His papers on dynamic programming from the 1960s have been cited hundreds of times as nearly all developments in the field stem from his fundamental work. He was also recognized for his early collaborations with Kenneth J. Arrow. Together they helped lay the foundations of sequential analysis in game theory. He additionally developed the Rao-Blackwell theorem on statistical estimation which created a more effective method for improving estimates. Blackwell was an early proponent of Bayseian statistical decision making that incorporates the probability that something will happen based on available evidence.

Blackwell was a prolific and pioneering author who published two monumental textbooks on statistics and game theory. His first book, Theory of Games and Statistical Decisions (1954), offered the first significant, rigorous mathematical treatment of statistics, drawing upon The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944) by von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern. Blackwell had a very distinct opinion on original research and often claimed to be “interested in understanding, which is a quite different thing” than seeking and obtaining new and distinct ideas. During his career, he served as an officer with multiple professional organizations and supervised over sixty PhD students. Blackwell retired from Cal Berkeley in 1988 and passed away at age ninety-one. 

Other Biographies

Wikipedia Entry for David Blackwell

Agwu N., Smith L., & Barry A. (2003) Dr. David Harold Blackwell, African-American Pioneer. in Mathematics Magazine 76: 3-14. 

American Statistical Association. Statisticians in History: David H. Blackwell. Accessed November 13, 2018. (link)

Brillinger D. R. (2010) Biographical Memoirs, David H. Blackwell. in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 156(2): 218-222. (link)

University of St. Andrews School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences. Blackwell Biography. Accessed December 22, 2017. (link)

Cinlar E. & J. Pitman (eds) David H. Blackwell Celebratio Mathematica.  Accessed November 19, 2015 (link)

National Visionary Leadership Project. David Harold Blackwell: National Visionary Video Playlist. Accessed January 6, 2015. (link)

David Blackwell (1984) Interview by Morris H. DeGroot. Statistical Science, Berkeley, CA. (transcript)

David Blackwell (2002/3) Interview by Nadine Williams. Regional Oral History Office, the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, CA.  (transcript)