David Blackwell

David Harold Blackwell was an American statistician and mathematician, born on 24 April 1919 and died on 8 July 2010, 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 he wrote one of the first Bayesian statistics textbooks, his 1969 Basic Statistics. He was the first African American inducted into the National Academy of Sciences and the first African American full professor with tenure at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2012 President Barack Obama posthumously awarded him the National Medal of Science.