David Blackwell (1919–2010) was a pioneering African American mathematician and statistician whose foundational work in probability, decision theory, and game theory underpins modern AI and machine learning. His research on Rao-Blackwell theorem and Markov decision processes is critical to how AI systems learn, optimise outcomes, and make decisions under uncertainty. And that is why, in recognition of his work, NVIDIA named its next-generation AI GPU architecture “Blackwell”.