David Blackwell
American mathematician (1919-2010) · United States · On the map · Academics · Died at 91
David Harold Blackwell was an American statistician and mathematician who made significant contributions to game theory, probability theory, information theory, and statistics.
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A typical day, 30 days to 6 November 2026
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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.
