02/04/2026
February is Black History Month!
"David Blackwell (born April 24, 1919, Centralia, Illinois, U.S.—died July 8, 2010, Berkeley, California) was an American statistician and mathematician who made significant contributions to game theory, probability theory, information theory, and Bayesian statistics and who broke racial barriers when he was named (1965) the first African American member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.
Blackwell, the son of a railroad worker, taught himself to read as a boy. He initially planned to become an elementary school teacher, and at age 16 he entered the University of Illinois, where his early aptitude for mathematics blossomed. He earned bachelor’s (1938), master’s (1939), and doctorate (1941) degrees, and, after a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, he briefly worked for the U.S. Office of Price Administration.
Blackwell sent applications to numerous African American colleges, and he worked as an instructor at Southern University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Clark College, Atlanta, before receiving an appointment in the mathematics department at Howard University, Washington, D.C., in 1944; he became head of the department in 1947. In 1954 Blackwell was invited to join the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, where he became that institution’s first African American tenured professor. He also served as chairman (1957–61) of the statistics department there. He was additionally appointed professor of mathematics in 1973, and he retired in 1988. While working (1948–50) as a consultant at the RAND Corporation, Blackwell applied game theory to military situations by analyzing the optimum timing of theoretical armed duelists."
In March 2024, NVIDIA unveiled its next-generation GPU architecture, Blackwell, named in honor of Dr. David Harold Blackwell (1919–2010), a groundbreaking African American mathematician and statistician. The Blackwell platform is designed to power a new era of computing and generative AI, with CEO Jensen Huang highlighting its role as the "world's most advanced GPU".