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Rao-Blacwell

Theorem

Explained by Elijah!

https://matthewhr.wordpress.com/2012/12/02/rao-blackwell-theorem/

After College

College

Dr. Blackwell was appointed a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study from 1941 for a year. At that time, members of the Institute were automatically officially made visting fellows of Princeton University, and thus Blackwell was listed in its bulletin as such. This caused considerable ruckus as there had never been a black student, much less faculty fellow, at the University (it had rejected Paul Robeson because of race). The president of Princeton wrote the director of the Institute that the Institute was abusing the University's hospitality by admitting a black. Many years later inspite of heavy teaching duties, not to speak of heavy administrative duties and a mathematically unstimulating institution, Blackwell published a substantial amount of research. He spent a couple of summers at the RAND corporation and was a Visiting Professor of Statisitcs at Stanford University in 1950-51. Still Blackwell searched for mathematics around Washington and met M. A. Girschick of the Department of Agriculture and who was to be a collaborator in many works: their 1954 book, Theory of Games and Statistical Decisions, is classic in the area. With the exception of a one year visit to Stanford University, Blackwell stayed at Howard until 1954. When he left, he had been Chair of the Department of Mathematics and had published more than 20 papers. In 1954 he gave an invited address in probability at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Amsterdam (The Netherlands). Right afterwards, he was appointed Professor of Statistics at the University of California at Berkeley, where he was chairman of the Statistics Department for many years.

He was President of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 1955. He has also been Vice President of the American Statistical Association, the International Statistical Institute, and the American Mathematical Society. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society. In 1965 he became the first African American named to the National Academy of Sciences. In 1979 Blackwell won the von Neumann Theory Prize (the Operations Research Society of America) in 1979. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

About David H. Blackwell

Sixteen year old Blackwell entered the University of Illinois in 1935, where his love for mathematics continued to grow. The course that really helped make his mind up was the course on real analysis based on Hardy's Pure Mathematics. In the same interview he said, "That's the first time I knew that serious mathematics was for me. It became clear that it was not simply a few things that I liked. The whole subject was just beautiful..". The not so beautiful side of this was that the money he needed got short. His dad had to borrow money, and Blackwell took on jobs such as dish-washing to make ends meet, but this didn't stop him. These jobs along with summer classes helped Blackwell to graduate with a B.A. after three years of studying. After Graduating Blackwell continued to study at the same college. He received his Masters Degree in 1939 and his doctorate (supervised by Joseph Doob) in 1941 for his thesis on Markov chains.

David H. Blackwell was born on April 24, 1919 in Centralia, Illinois. His parents were Grover Blackwell, a railroad worker and Mabel Johnson. David was the oldest out of their four children.

Educational Background

Being an African American, you would expect for Blackwell to attend one of the two segregated schools in his hometown, but in an interview he said he was fortunate to attend an integrated school. Blackwell also said during his interview that he had a mixed reaction to mathematics in school. He didn't find Algebra and Trigonometry attractive although he was very competent in his work in these subjects. However, he did enjoy geometry. He applied his mathematical skills to games like "Noughts and Crosses" to analyze winning strategies/probabilities for the first player.

David Harold Blackwell

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