Blackwell, David, 1919-2010

David Harold Blackwell April 24, 1919, Centralia, Illinois – July 8, 2010, Berkeley, California; first African American inducted into the National Academy of Sciences, the first black tenured faculty member at UC Berkeley, and the seventh African American to receive a Ph.D. in Mathematics; entered the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with the intent to study elementary school mathematics and become a teacher. In 1938 he earned his bachelor's degree in mathematics and a master's degree in 1939, and was awarded a PhD in mathematics in 1941 at the age of 22, all by the University of Illinois. Blackwell was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity; post-doctoral studies as a fellow at Institute for Advanced Study in 1941, met John von Neumann; statistician Jerzy Neyman supported an appointment at UC Berkeley but he was rejected because he was black; taught at Southern University at Baton Rouge, Clark University, Howard University; spent his summers at RAND Corporation with Meyer A. Girshick; He took a position at the University of California, Berkeley as a visiting professor in 1954, and was hired as a full professor in the newly created Statistics Department in 1955, becoming the Statistics department chair in 1956. He spent the rest of his career at UC Berkeley, retiring in 1988, In 2018, UC Berkeley named an undergraduate residence hall in his honor. David Blackwell Hall opened in Fall 2018