Statistics honors two of its finest

Peg Skorpinski photo

14 February 2002 | Department of Statistics Chair John Rice, left, greets Professor Emeritus David Blackwell and Professor Lester Dubins at a Feb. 4-6 campus conference celebrating their achievements. The two men “have had a profound impact on the study of probability, statistics and stochastic games, through their research, teaching and remarkable personalities,” conference organizers said.

The most renowned African American mathematician, Blackwell earned his Ph.D. in 1941, at the age of 22.
A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Blackwell has served as president of the American Statistical Society and vice president of the American Mathematical Society.

Dubins, who received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1955, has been on the Berkeley faculty since 1960. The 1998 movie “Run, Lola, Run” — in which the heroine achieves her goal by wagering everything on a long shot — mirrors the premise of the classic book on the mathematics of gambling, “Inequalities for Stochastic Processes: How to Gamble If You Must,” which Dubins co-authored.