David H. Blackwell

In 1941, David Blackwell became the seventh African American to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics. He spent the following year at the Institute as a Member in the School of Mathematics, where he developed his doctoral thesis into his first published paper, about Markov chains in probability. This work later grew into a series of papers that provided a rigorous mathematical basis for the theory of dynamic programming. Blackwell’s work in probability, statistics, game theory, and dynamic programming came to have wide-ranging influence, but he recalled in a 1984 interview that he didn’t choose problems to work on because of their potential applicability. “I just picked directions that interested me and worked in them. And I have had fun,” he said. “I guess that’s the way scholars should work. Don’t worry about the overall importance of the problem; work on it if it looks interesting. I think there’s probably a sufficient correlation between interest and importance.”