Blacks Who Should Have Won Nobel Prizes

5. David Blackwell

(1919-2010)

Nobel Prize in Mathematics

The son of a railroad worker with a fourth grade education, David Blackwell is considered the greatest of all African American mathematicians and among the world’s preeminent statisticians of all time.  Born in Centralia, IL, he taught himself to read by looking at the words and pictures on seed packages.  He was the seventh African American to receive a doctorate in math, earning his degree in 1941 from the University of Illinois. In 1979, he won the von Neumann Theory Prize. A free-ranging problem-solver in many subdisciplines, he researched the mathematics of bluffing and developed a theory on the optimal moment for an advancing duelist to open fire, a problem with battlefield applications because the question of when to open fire is vitally important.  Blackwell has contributed to several areas in mathematics, including dynamic programming, game theory, measure theory, probability theory, set theory, and mathematical statistics. Several theorems are named for him, including the Rao-Blackwell theorem, which shows how to turn crude guesses into good estimates. Blackwell’s renewal theorem deals with a unit’s operating lifetime. He also introduced the concept of Blackwell space.