Tribute: Dr. David Blackwell, 1919-2010: Like many African-American mathematicians who came of age in the 1980s and afterward, I was first aware of professor David Blackwell's contributions to areas in probability, such as renewal theory, before I knew that he was African-American. Later, I would come to meet him personally. Still later, I discovered that as a professor at Howard University in the early 1950s he taught mathematics major David Dinkins, who became the first African-American mayor of New York in 1990.In the summer of 1980 as a graduate student working at Bell Laboratories (later to work there full time the following year) I met Dr. Wesley Thompson. He was a young African-American statistician who had just joined the Mathematical Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley under the direction of Blackwell on the topic of 'conditional medians.' Tragically, Thompson died a year later in a swimming accident.
