David Blackwell, the first African-American member of the National Academy of Science and the first African-American to become a tenured faculty member at Berkeley, died last week at the age of 91.
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Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
You cannot love your country only when you win.
Radicalized white males who support Trump are pitching a tent in the abyss.
You come for women, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.
No one could have predicted…
Dumb motherfuckers cannot understand a consequence that most 4 year olds have fully sorted out.
Today’s gop: why go just far enough when too far is right there?
Oppose, oppose, oppose. do not congratulate. this is not business as usual.
Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.
I am pretty sure these ‘journalists’ were not always such a bootlicking sycophants.
Republicans don’t lie to be believed, they lie to be repeated.
the 10% who apparently lack object permanence
Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.
Never entrust democracy to any process that requires Republicans to act in good faith.
“Facilitate” is an active verb, not a weasel word.
A norm that restrains only one side really is not a norm – it is a trap.
Not rolling over. fuck you, make me.
In after Baud. Damn.
Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard
Do we throw up our hands or do we roll up our sleeves? (hint, door #2)
Weird. Rome has an American Pope and America has a Russian President.
They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.
Tick tock motherfuckers!
When I was faster i was always behind.
When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?
James K. Polk, Esq.
Go Bears!
Rey
Thank you for recognizing this Doug J but, the obit didn’t mention his rank within the Black Panther party?
mellowjohn
on a lighter note, today is the 88th birthday of former senator and 1972 presidential candidate george mcgovern. of all that’s been said and written about this great man (and i recommend stephen ambrose’s “the wild blue”) maybe the best was this from hunter s. thompson:
“Of all the men that have run for president in the twentieth century, only George McGovern truly understood what a monument America could be to the human race.”
ppcli
He was a wonderful man. My PhD research overlapped with some research he did in a kind of old fashioned “Polish” descriptive set theory. (Not the really major stuff like the Rao-Blackwell theorem – this was some incidental work he did later in his career apparently more or less as a hobby. It was a sign to me of what a great mathematician he was that I had devoted every ounce of energy I had to working out results in an area that as far as I could tell he viewed as a kind of free time diversion.) I met him by accident – In the early 90s I was in the office of a faculty member in the Berkeley logic group, talking about completely different stuff. He happened to walk by the open door, and we were introduced. I was completely charmed by his warmth and good humor.
(An aside: the mathematical community of that generation, at the very top levels, is fairly solidly Caucasian and Asian. I had no idea Blackwell was African-American until I met him. I am eternally grateful that when we were first introduced, I didn’t say in a pleased-but-surprised tone “Wow, you’re African American – that’s great!”, or something equally moronic. Because I was a microsecond away from blurting that out, before my (rarely used) internal editor fortunately caught me.)
DougJ
@ppcli:
I was also at Berkeley in the mid ’90s and TA’ed in statistics. I never spoke to Blackwell, but I used to see him around a lot.
JCT
While I took my share of Stats at Cal as an undergrad (way before you youngsters) I never had the chance to interact with Blackwell directly, but my friends in the Dept., said he was a delight to deal with.
My theorist husband (also a Cal grad) just commented that it is not uncommon in his branch of math/statistics for the talent to be truly innate.
Oh, and I agree, Go Bears!
JCT ’84
Andrew J. Lazarus
JFTR, Go Bears!
Did everyone on this blog except John take a {math | stat | group in logic} degree at Cal?
jl
I think Blackwell was one of the most wide ranging, creative and technically elegant probabilists of the latter half of the twentieth century. Stochastic processes, dynanmic optimization, information theory, game theory, statistics, relationship between game theory and symbolic logic.
He’s got a lot of stuff named after him: Rao-Blackwell theorem (statistical estimation), Blackwell optimal policy (dynamic programming), Blackwell channel (information theory) come to mind immediately.
His wikipedia page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Blackwell
Some videos of interviews:
http://www.visionaryproject.com/blackwelldavid
thanks for posting this. It is sad news, even though he was in his nineties.
David Margolies
“Did everyone on this blog except John take a {math | stat | group in logic} degree at Cal?”
Evidently (me, PhD Math 1978). I remember Blackwell very well, and went to many lectures and would see him at coffee hours etc. A highpoint of my (brief) academic career was noticing an error in a draft paper of his which was being circulated and getting a very gracious thank you letter from him in response to my pointing it out.