When did david blackwell diedinhouse
David blackwell usf...
David Blackwell, professor and scholar of probability
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, died July 8 in Berkeley, Calif.
He was 91.
When did david blackwell diedinhouse
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, 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, professor emeritus of statistics, at the University of California, Los Angeles,