[NTA] FW: NY Times obituary for David Blackwell
- From: "Ericsson, Aprille J. (GSFC-5560)" <aprille.j.ericsson@xxxxxxxx>
- To: undisclosed-recipients:;
- Date: Mon, 19 Jul 2010 09:14:31 -0500
Another giant joins the ancestors.
Amy
The Work Goes On, the Cause Endures... and the Dream Shall Never Die --
Senator Edward M. Kennedy
Begin forwarded message:
Date: July 18, 2010 8:58:58 AM EDT
Subject: NY Times obituary
The very essence of the phrase "a gentleman and a scholar."
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/17/education/17blackwell.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=David%20Blackwell%20obituary&st=cse
warm regards,
Troy
David Blackwell, Scholar of Probability, Dies at 91
By WILLIAM
GRIMES<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/william_grimes/index.html?inline=nyt-per>
Published: July 16, 2010
*
*
MySpace<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/17/education/17blackwell.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=David%20Blackwell%20obituary&st=cse>
* Yahoo!
Buzz<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/17/education/17blackwell.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=David%20Blackwell%20obituary&st=cse>
*
Permalink<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/17/education/17blackwell.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=David%20Blackwell%20obituary&st=cse>
*
David Blackwell, a statistician and mathematician who wrote groundbreaking
papers on probability and game theory and was the first black scholar to be
admitted to the National Academy of
Sciences<http://www.nasonline.org/site/PageServer>, died July 8 in Berkeley,
Calif. He was 91.
<javascript:pop_me_up2('http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2010/07/17/us/BLACKWELL-obit.html','BLACKWELL_obit_html','width=720,height=563,scrollbars=yes,toolbars=no,resizable=yes')>
[cid:part1.01080705.07040104@nyu.edu]<javascript:pop_me_up2('http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2010/07/17/us/BLACKWELL-obit.html','BLACKWELL_obit_html','width=720,height=563,scrollbars=yes,toolbars=no,resizable=yes')>
UC Berkeley
David Blackwell
The death was confirmed by his son Hugo.
Mr. Blackwell, the son of a railroad worker with a fourth-grade education,
taught for nearly 35 years at the University of California,
Berkeley<http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/university_of_california/index.html?inline=nyt-org>,
where he became the first black tenured professor.
He made his mark as a free-ranging problem solver in numerous subdisciplines.
His fascination with game theory, for example, prompted him to investigate the
mathematics of bluffing and to develop a theory on the optimal moment for an
advancing duelist to open fire.
"He went from one area to another, and he'd write a fundamental paper in each,"
Thomas Ferguson, an emeritus professor of statistics at the University of
California, Los
Angeles<http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/university_of_california/index.html?inline=nyt-org>,
told the Berkeley Web
site.<http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2010/07/15_blackwell.shtml>
"He would come into a field that had been well studied and find something
really new that was remarkable. That was his forte."
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<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/university_of_illinois/index.html?inline=nyt-org>
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 statistician Jerzy
Neyman<http://sciencematters.berkeley.edu/archives/volume2/issue12/legacy.php>
wanted to hire him in the mathematics department, racial objections also
blocked his appointment.
Instead, Mr. Blackwell sent out applications to 104 black colleges on the
assumption that no other schools would hire him. After working for a year at
the Office of Price Administration, he taught briefly at Southern University in
Baton Rouge, La., and Clark College in Atlanta before joining the mathematics
department at Howard University in Washington in 1944.
While at Howard, he attended a lecture by Meyer A. Girshick at the local
chapter of the American Statistical Association<http://www.amstat.org/>. He
became intensely interested in statistics and developed a lifelong friendship
with Girshick, with whom he wrote "Theory of Games and Statistical
Decisions"<http://www.amazon.com/Theory-Games-Statistical-Decisions-Blackwell/dp/0486638316>
(1954).
As a consultant to the RAND Corporation<http://www.rand.org/> from 1948 to
1950, he applied game theory to military situations. It was there that he
turned his attention to what might be called the duelist's dilemma, a problem
with application to the battlefield, where the question of when to open fire
looms large.
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<http://orfe.princeton.edu/conferences/frontiers/Biography.pdf>, 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.
In 1965 he was elected to the National Academy of
Sciences<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/national_academy_of_sciences/index.html?inline=nyt-org>.
In addition to his son Hugo, of Berkeley, he is survived by three of his eight
children, Ann Blackwell and Vera Gleason, both of Oakland, and Sarah Hunt
Dahlquist of Houston; a sister, Elizabeth Cowan of Clayton, N.C.; and 14
grandchildren.
Mr. Blackwell described himself as a "dilettante" in a 1983 interview for
"Mathematical People," a collection of profiles and interviews. "Basically, I'm
not interested in doing research and I never have been," he said. "I'm
interested in understanding, which is quite a different thing. And often to
understand something you have to work it out yourself because no one else has
done it."
Other related posts:
- » [NTA] FW: NY Times obituary for David Blackwell - Ericsson, Aprille J. (GSFC-5560)
