David Blackwell has passed away

Via Inherent Uncertainty I learned that David Blackwell passed away on July 8th.

Prof. Blackwell’s original paper (with Leo Breiman and Aram Thomasian) on the arbitrarily varying channel was an inspiration to me, and he served on my thesis committee a scant 2 years ago.

I’ll always remember what he told me when I handed him a draft of my thesis. “The best thing about Bayesians is that they’re always right.”

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3 thoughts on “David Blackwell has passed away

  1. Pingback: A human being of extraordinary personal fortitude « The Leisure of the Theory Class

  2. I just spoke to David Sarason yesterday about it (he’s in math at Berkeley). He told me some interesting stories about how Blackwell got hired at Berkeley. You’d likely know part of these stories, but I feel that parts of it were not publicly known. Sometime when we meet over drinks.

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