Wall Street Journal July 17, 2010 Statistician Overcame Racial Barriers By Stephen Miller David Blackwell was a leading statistician who made contributions to game theory and once helped the U.S. Air Force calculate the probability of war. Mr. Blackwell, who died July 8 at age 91, was doubly a pioneer because he was an African-American statistician, a rarity in academia in the 1940s and 1950s. After earning his Ph.D. in mathematics at age 22, Mr. Blackwell was shut out of positions at the University of California, Berkeley. He landed at Howard University. In 1954, Berkeley reversed course and Mr. Blackwell became the campus's first tenured black professor. A decade later, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and is believed to be the first black member in its history. A self-described "dilettante" in math, Mr. Blackwell made contributions in a number of areas, including dynamic programming and information theory. "He went from one area to another, and he'd write a fundamental paper in each," said Thomas Ferguson, professor emeritus of statistics at the University of California, Los Angeles. Raised in Centralia, Ill., Mr. Blackwell was the son of a railroad worker who took on extra work to send his children to college. He was a precocious student, and said his first classroom was a grocery store owned by relatives. "There would be a package of seeds for a pumpkin, and there would be a picture with the word 'PUMPKIN,' " said Mr. Blackwell in a 2009 interview with the Illinois Alumni Magazine. "That's how I learned to read." He came to love math in high school from teachers who convinced him that "the whole subject was just beautiful," he said in a 1983 interview for the book "Mathematical People." He studied math in college, intending at first to teach elementary school but then won a fellowship for graduate study at the University of Illinois. When in 1942 Berkeley tried to recruit Mr. Blackwell's thesis adviser, Joseph Doob, Mr. Doob recommended Mr. Blackwell. Berkeley passed on Mr. Blackwell, who instead sent out 105 application letters, one to every black college in the country, ending up at Howard. "But of course he's black and in spite of the fact that we are in a war that's advancing the cause of democracy, it may not have spread throughout our own land," Mr. Doob wrote in a letter to a member of the Berkeley faculty. During summers in the late 1940s, Mr. Blackwell worked at Rand Corp., where he contributed to game theory as exemplified by the case of duels. The question was, with each duelist wielding a single-shot pistol and advancing on each other, when was the optimal moment to shoot? During the early days of the Cold War, the question became more than just academic. The Air Force came asking about the probability of war so it could decide on a weapons-development strategy. Out of his work at Rand came his book, "Theory of Games and Statistical Decisions," a classic in the field. A renowned teacher, Mr. Blackwell seems never to have given an interview in which he failed to jump up and illustrate some point on the blackboard. He raised eight children, and for many years lived without a telephone in his home. He hated how it interfered with conversation. "What a rude, impolite instrument that is," he said in the "Mathematical People" interview. SANDRA M. PHOENIX Program Director HBCU Library Alliance sphoenix@hbculibraries.org<mailto:sphoenix@hbculibraries.org> www.hbculibraries.org<http://www.hbculibraries.org/> 404.592.4820 1438 West Peachtree Street NW Suite 200 Atlanta, GA 30309 Toll Free: 1.800.999.8558 (Lyrasis) Fax: 404.892.7879 www.lyrasis.org<http://www.lyrasis.org/> Honor the ancestors, honor the children. Register now http://www.hbculibraries.org/html/meeting-form.html for the October 24-26, 2010 HBCU Library Alliance 4th Membership Meeting and the "Conference on Advocacy" pre-conference in Montgomery, AL. The Pre-Conference and Membership meeting are open to directors and other librarians.