David Blackwell

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For the American football coach, see David Blackwell (American football).
David Blackwell
Joseph Leo Doob[2]
Doctoral students

David Harold Blackwell (April 24, 1919 – July 8, 2010) was an American

National Academy of Sciences, the first African American full professor (with tenure) at the University of California, Berkeley,[3][5][6] and the seventh African American to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics.[7] In 2012, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Blackwell the National Medal of Science
.

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]

Early life and education

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
.

Career and research

Postdoctoral study and early career

Blackwell completed one year of

Rosenwald Fellowship, which was a fund to aid black scholars.[12]

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]

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.

Howard University

Blackwell joined the Mathematics Department at

Rao-Blackwell theorem.[17] The theorem provides a method for improving statistical estimates by potentially reducing their mean squared error
.

From 1948 to 1950, Blackwell spent his summers at

Nobel Laureate Kenneth J. Arrow.[19]

University of California, Berkeley

Blackwell took a position at the

full professor in the newly created Department of Statistics in 1955. He became the Statistics department chair in 1957.[12][20][21]

Blackwell bridged topology and game theory via a game-theoretic proof of Kuratowski's theorem in 1967.[22] Blackwell only briefly extended his research beyond zero-sum games to explore the sure-thing principle[23][24] as introduced by Jimmie Savage,[25] primarily due the real-world societal implications of the mathematical result,[clarification needed][26] particularly for nuclear disarmament[how?] at the inception of the Cold War.[27]

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]

Personal life and death

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.

David Blackwell died of complications from a stroke on July 8, 2010, at Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in Berkeley, California.[29] He was 91 years old.

Honors and awards

In his lifetime, Blackwell received 12 honorary doctorates.

Legacy

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

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.[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 Blackwell GPU architecture, named in honour of David Blackwell.[37][38]

Bibliography

Books

  • Blackwell, David; Girshick, M. A. (1954). Theory of Games and Statistical Decisions. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
    ISBN 0-486-63831-6
    .
  • Blackwell, D. (1969). Basic Statistics. McGraw Hill.

Journal articles

References

  1. ^ a b David Blackwell publications indexed by Google Scholar Edit this at Wikidata
  2. ^ a b c David Blackwell at the Mathematics Genealogy Project Edit this at Wikidata
  3. ^ a b Sorkin, Michael (July 14, 2010). "David Blackwell fought racism; become world-famous statistician". St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Retrieved April 10, 2024.
  4. ^ Roussas, G.G. et al. (2011) A Tribute to David Blackwell, NAMS 58(7), 912–928.
  5. ^ Cattau, Daniel (July 2009). "David Blackwell 'Superstar'". Illinois Alumni. University of Illinois Alumni Association. pp. 32–34.
  6. ^ "Joseph Thomas Gier; "Wasn't David Blackwell First?"". Joseph Gier Memorial Project. Berkeley EECS. Retrieved September 26, 2023.
  7. ^ a b Schoemig, Skylar (February 25, 2020). "'A Berkeley hero': UC Berkeley professors, alumnus reflect on legacy of David Blackwell". The Daily Californian. Retrieved June 18, 2021.
  8. ^
    ISBN 978-0-88385-569-0
    .
  9. ^
    OCLC 41497065.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link
    )
  10. ^ "Blackwell, David Harold (1919-2010) | The Black Past: Remembered and Reclaimed". Black Past. July 27, 2010. Retrieved September 26, 2017.
  11. ISBN 0-89774-955-3
    .
  12. ^ a b c d e f g Grime, David (July 17, 2010). "David Blackwell, Scholar of Probability, Dies at 91". The New York Times. Retrieved April 10, 2024.
  13. ^ "Mission and History". Institute for Advances Studies. March 15, 2016.
  14. ISBN 978-1-56881-340-0
    .
  15. ^ "David Blackwell: Berkley [sic]". YouTube. March 12, 2010. Retrieved June 10, 2020.
  16. ^ Black, Robert (2019). David Blackwell and the Deadliest Duel. Unionville, NY: Royal Fireworks Press. pp. 57–59.
  17. Zbl 0033.07603
    .
  18. ISBN 0-486-63831-6
    .
  19. ^ 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.
  20. doi:10.1214/ss/1177013814
    .
  21. ^ a b "David Blackwell". Mathematics at Illinois. Retrieved November 3, 2021.
  22. PMID 16578685
    .
  23. ^ Jeffrey, Richard (1982). "The Sure Thing Principle". Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association. 1982 (2): 719–730. 10.1086/psaprocbienmeetp.1982.2.192456.JSTOR 192456.S2CID 124506828.
  24. ^ Pearl, Judea (December 2015). "The sure-thing principle" (PDF). UCLA Cognitive Systems Laboratory, Technical Report R-466.
  25. ^ Savage, L. J. (1954), The foundations of statistics. John Wiley & Sons Inc., New York.
  26. ^ 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.
  27. S2CID 120904626
    .
  28. ^ Spelman Messenger Spelman College
  29. ISSN 0190-8286
    . Retrieved September 26, 2017.
  30. ^ "David Blackwell". Recognizing Excellence/Award Recipients. INFORMS. Retrieved June 12, 2019.
  31. ^ "R.A. Fisher Award and Lectureship - Past Recipients". Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies. Retrieved June 12, 2019.
  32. ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved April 19, 2022.
  33. ^ Fellows: Alphabetical List, Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, retrieved October 9, 2019
  34. ^ "Laureates - David Blackwell". National Science & Technology Medals Foundation. Retrieved May 21, 2018.
  35. ^ "MAA-NAM Blackwell Lecture". www.nam-math.org. Archived from the original on June 23, 2021. Retrieved June 18, 2021.
  36. ^ Kane, Will (February 8, 2018). "New dorm to honor Berkeley's first tenured black professor". UC Berkeley. Retrieved May 21, 2018.
  37. ^ "Nvidia Blackwell Platform Arrives to Power a New Era of Computing". Nvidia Newsroom. Retrieved March 18, 2024.
  38. ^ Leswing, Kif (March 18, 2024). "Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announces new AI chips: 'We need bigger GPUs'". CNBC. Retrieved March 18, 2024.

External links

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