David Blackwell
David Harold Blackwell (April 24, 1919 – July 8, 2010) was an American
statistician and
mathematician who made significant contributions to
game theory,
probability theory,
information theory, and statistics. He is one of the
eponyms of the
Rao–Blackwell theorem, and is also known for the
Blackwell channel,
Blackwell's contraction mapping theorem, Blackwell's approachability theorem, and the
Blackwell order. He wrote one of the first
Bayesian statistics textbooks, his 1969 ''Basic Statistics''. He was the first African American inducted into the
National Academy of Sciences, the first African American full professor with
tenure at the
University of California, Berkeley, and the
seventh African American to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics. By the time he retired, he had published more than 90 papers and books on
dynamic programming, game theory, and mathematical statistics. In 2012,
President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Blackwell the
National Medal of Science.
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