David Harold Blackwell
Blackwell earned his PhD at the age of 22, studying at the University of Illinois under Joseph Doob. His dissertation dealt with Markov chains. His dissertation was sufficiently noteworthy that he received the distinguished Rosenwald Postdoctoral Fellow to continue his researches at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. The custom at the time was for Fellows at the Institute to be honorary faculty at Princeton University. However, Princeton had never had an African-American faculty member and the possibility met with considerable prejudice and opposition within the University.
During his time at the Institute, Blackwell sought a permanent academic position. He interviewed at the University of California in Berkeley, where his application was strongly supported by Neyman, but prejudice once again intervened and he was not offered a post. After brief positions at two historically black colleges, Blackwell was appointed as an instructor at Howard University in 1944 and in only four years was appointed to full professor and head of the department of mathematics. In 1954 Blackwell left Howard for an appointment at Berkeley where he was appointed chair of the Department of Statistics in 1956. Blackwell remained at Berkeley for the rest of his career.
While at Howard Blackwell became interested in the theory of games and published in 1954 Theory of Games and Statistical Decisions with Abe Girshek. The "duelist game" became one of his particular interests. During the Cold War this game had enormous implications for nuclear strategies and Blackwell became a leading expert on the topic.
Blackwell held high offices in the American Statistical Association, the American Mathematical Society and the International Statistical Institute. In 1965 he was elected to the National Academy of Science. He received the John von Neuman prize for his work on Operations Research and the R.A. Fisher prize for his contributions to statistical theory.
Further information on Dr. Blackwell may be found at The University of California in Berkeley and at The State University of New York at Buffalo.
Born: 24 April 1919 in Centralia, Illinois, USA
The premiere site for biographies of mathematicians on the web is at The University of Saint Andrews in Scotland; this is the primary source of the information in these short biographies. Some biographies used additional web resources as noted in the biography.
The postage stamp images came from a wonderful site on mathematicians on stamps maintained by Jeff Miller, a mathematics teacher in Florida.
The Free Internet Encyclopedia Wikipedia is also an excellent source of information and was used as a reference for many bographies.
The opinions expressed in these biographies are those of the author and do not reflect official views of the University of Oklahoma.
