David Blackwell, American mathematician and academic (died 2010)

David Harold Blackwell was an American statistician and mathematician who made significant contributions to game theory, probability theory, information theory, and statistics. He is one of the eponyms of the Rao–Blackwell theorem, and is also known for the Blackwell channel, Blackwell's contraction mapping theorem, Blackwell's approachability theorem, and the Blackwell order. He was the first African American inducted into the National Academy of Sciences, the first African American full professor with tenure at the University of California, Berkeley, and the seventh African American to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics. Blackwell was also a pioneer in textbook writing. He wrote one of the first Bayesian statistics textbooks, his 1969 Basic Statistics. By the time he retired, he had published over 90 papers and books on dynamic programming, game theory, and mathematical statistics. In 2012, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Blackwell the National Medal of Science.