BlackFacts.com presents the black fact of the day for April 24.

Mathematician David Blackwell was born.

He made significant contributions to game theory, probability theory, information theory, and Bayesian statistics.

He also broke racial barriers when he was named the first African American member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

At age 16 he entered the University of Illinois, where his early aptitude for mathematics blossomed.

He earned bachelor’s (1938), master’s (1939), and doctorate (1941) degrees, and a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey.

In 1954 Blackwell was invited to join the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, where he became that institution’s first African American tenured professor.  

He was known for his independent invention of dynamic programming, which is used today in finance and in various areas of science, including genome analysis.  

He wrote two books, published more than 80 papers and held 12 honorary degrees from Harvard, Yale, Carnegie Mellon, Howard and other universities.

In 2018, UC Berkeley named an undergraduate residence hall in his honor.

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