RSSeNEWS to be determined...

David H Blackwell, the statistician and mathematician who transcended poverty and racism to enjoy a long and successful academic career, has died aged 91.  

He was the first African American to be elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the first black tenured professor at the University of California at Berkeley and served a term as president of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He was made an honorary fellow of the Royal Statistical Society in 1976.

Blackwell's work spanned many areas including probability, game theory and information theory. He developed the renewal theorem used in engineering and collaborated with C R Rao to develop the Rao-Blackwell Theorem. He is credited as the inventor of dynamic programming, whose present day applications include finance and genome analysis.