Professor David Blackwell (1919 – 2010) was a distinguished American statistician and mathematician who made significant contributions to game theory, probability theory, information theory, and Bayesian statistics. He is one of the eponyms of the Rao–Blackwell theorem and became the first African-American elected member of the US National Academy of Sciences. As a Department, we wanted to mark his ground-breaking work and are delighted to hold this annual lecture named after him in October each year.
