David Blackwell
David Blackwell
Blackwell was the first black person to receive a PhD in statistics (from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in 1941 at the age of 22) in the US and the first black scholar to be admitted to the National Academy of Sciences. He was a statistician at UC Berkeley for more than 50 years. He was hired in 1954 after the department almost made him an offer in 1942 (but declined to do so when one faculty member’s wife said she didn’t want Blackwell hired because she wouldn’t feel comfortable having faculty events in her home with a black man). Hear Blackwell tell the story in his own words.
Topics covered
Blackwell contributed to game theory, probability theory, information science, and Bayesian statistics. The Rao-Blackwell theorem (often seen in a senior level undergraduate class on statistical theory) is named after him.
Relevant work
- Blackwell, D. (1947). “Conditional expectation and unbiased sequential estimation”. Annals of Mathematical Statistics. 18 (1): 105–110. doi:10.1214/aoms/1177730497.