BERKELEY, Ca. – Dr. David Blackwell, a pre-eminent mathematician and the first Black scholar in the National Academy of Sciences, has died. He was 91.
Blackwell died of natural causes at a hospital on July 8, University of California, Berkeley officials said.
Blackwell was the first tenured Black professor at the campus, where he taught for nearly 35 years.
Blackwell was known as a problem-solver who contributed to many areas, including probability and game theory.
Berkeley statistics professor Peter Bickel said Blackwell had a talent for making things appear simple.
“He liked elegance and simplicity,” Bickel said. “That is the ultimate best thing in mathematics, if you have an insight that something seemingly complicated is really simple.”
Blackwell referred to himself as a “sort of a dilettante” in an interview for the 1985 book Mathematical People: Profiles and Interviews, explaining he chose problems because he wanted to understand them, independent of what field they might fall under.
