A Conversation with David Blackwell

David Blackwell was born on April 24, 1919, in Centralia, Illinois. He entered the University of Illinois in 1935, and received his A.B. in 1938, his A.M. in 1939, and his Ph.D. in 1941, all in mathematics. He was a member of the faculty at Howard University from 1944 to 1954, and has been a Professor of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley, since that time. He was President of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 1955. He has also been Vice President of the American Statistical Association, the International Statistical Institute, and the American Mathematical Society, and President of the Bernoulli Society. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society and was awarded the von Neumann Theory Prize by the Operations Research Society of America and the Institute of Management Sciences in 1979. He has received honorary degrees from the University of Illinois, Michigan State University, Southern Illinois University, and Carnegie-Mellon University. The following conversation took place in his office at Berkeley one morning in October 1984.