Celebrity Friday: David Blackwell (1919-2010)

David Blackwell, the most prominent Black mathematician of his generation, has died at the age of 91. MadProfessah blogged about Blackwell last year on the occasion of his 90th birthday.

From his The New York Times obituary:

David Harold Blackwell was born on April 24, 1919, in Centralia, Ill. Early on, he showed a talent for mathematics, but he entered the University of Illinois with the modest ambition of becoming an elementary school teacher. He earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1938 and, adjusting his sights, went on to earn a master’s degree in 1939 and a doctorate in 1941, when he was only 22.

After being awarded a Rosenwald Fellowship, established by the clothing magnate Julius Rosenwald to aid black scholars, he attended the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton but left after a year when, because of his race, he was not issued the customary invitation to become an honorary faculty member. At Berkeley, where the statisticianJerzy Neyman wanted to hire him in the mathematics department, racial objections also blocked his appointment.

[...]

His “Basic Statistics” (1969) was one of the first textbooks on Bayesian statistics, which assess the uncertainty of future outcomes by incorporating new evidence as it arises, rather than relying on historical data. He also wrote numerous papers on multistage decision-making.

“He had this great talent for making things appear simple,” Peter Bickel, a statistics professor at Berkeley, told the university’s Web site. “He liked elegance and simplicity. That is the ultimate best thing in mathematics, if you have an insight that something seemingly complicated is really simple, but simple after the fact.”

Mr. Blackwell was hired by Berkeley in 1954 and became a full professor in the statistics department when it split off from the mathematics department in 1955. He was chairman of the department from 1957 to 1961 and assistant dean of the College of Letters and Science from 1964 to 1968. He retired in 1988.

As I noted before, Blackwell was the first Black person elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, which happened way back in 1965. I have attended the biennial Blackwell-Tapia conference in the past (2006 and 2008), which highlights the contributions of Black and Latino research mathematicians.