David Blackwell

David Blackwell ( born April 24, 1919 in Centralia, Illinois, † July 8, 2010 in Berkeley ) was an American mathematician who worked on statistics, and information theory.

Life and work

Blackwell was one of four children of a railway worker. He studied with the aim to become a lecturer at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, where he earned his bachelor's degree in 1938 and 1939, his master's degree in 1935. In 1941 he received his doctorate there. As a post - graduate student, he was 1941/42, the Institute for Advanced Study. He then taught at Southern University in Baton Rouge, at Clark College in Atlanta and in 1944 at Howard University, where he became in 1947 Professor and Head of the Mathematics Faculty. In 1954, he was initially at the invitation of Jerzy Neyman ( who wanted to get him back in the 1940s, according to Berkeley, but on racial prejudice failed ) as a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where he in the following year professor at the Faculty of newly formed Statistical been. 1957 to 1961 he was Director of the Statistics Department as the successor of Neyman. In 1988 he went to Berkeley to retire.

His interest in statistics awoke after he attended lectures by Abe Gershick at Howard University, with whom he worked closely. According to him, and CR Rao, the set of Rao -Blackwell is named. For game theory, he began to take an interest from 1948 to 1950 as a consultant to the Rand Corporation. Regardless of Richard Bellman, he developed the Dynamic Programming. He is also known for its renewal theorem in renewal theory with applications in the engineering sciences.

He was the first African American was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences (1965) and also the first African American professor with permanent tenure ( tenure ) in Berkeley. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1968), Honorary Member of the Royal Statistical Society (1976 ), President of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (1956 ) and 1978 Vice- President of the American Statistical Association. He was also vice president of the American Mathematical Society. In 1986 he was RA Fisher Lecturer and in 1979 he received the John von Neumann Theory Prize. He sat down for education in Africa as a participant of a UN conference and held on behalf of the Mathematical Association of America 1959/60 lectures primarily of blacks attended schools in the U.S. southern states in order to increase interest in mathematics.

He was twelve honorary doctorates (including Harvard, Yale, Carnegie Mellon, Michigan State University) and had 65 students.

Blackwell was married and had eight children.

Writings

• Basic Statistics, McGraw Hill 1969
• With M. Girshick: Theory of Games and Statistical Decisions, Wiley 1954