Abstract
I studied information theory with David Blackwell, worked on a minor paper with him ,and long admired him as colleague and friend. In this lecture I’ll try to give a glimpse of his personality. In this bootcamp you’ve undoubtedly been exposed to many advances based on his ideas. His papers are marked by both originality and apparent simplicity.I’ll try to illustrate this with a very brief pass over our joint paper,and a discussion of a favorite paper, his joint work with Arrow, and Girshick featuring backward induction,and also his Pacific Journal of Mathematics paper introducing games with vector payoff, and proving an appropriate minimax theorem.