David Blackwell

David Blackwell was a highly-regarded statistician and mathematician who taught at UC Berkeley for 30 years.  Apparently he was the kind of mathematician who could become interested in a new topic, learn about it, and then quickly produce profound results.   Then he’d move on.  Blackwell died on July 8th:  his obituary in the NYT can be found here.

Among other things, Blackwell was a strong proponent of the Bayesian approach to statistical inference, and he produced results in Game Theory regarding bluffing and dueling.