By the time he retired, he had published over 90 papers and books on dynamic programming, game theory, and mathematical statistics.

[9] Blackwell entered the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with the intent to study elementary school mathematics and become a teacher.

At the time, Blackwell was the seventh African American to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics in the United States and the first at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Blackwell completed one year of postdoctoral research as a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) at Princeton in 1941 after receiving a Rosenwald Fellowship, which was a fund to aid black scholars.

[12] Seeking a permanent position elsewhere, he wrote letters of application to 104 historically black colleges and universities in 1942, and received a total of only three offers.

[16] Having been highly recommended by his dissertation advisor Joseph L. Doob for a position at the University of California, Berkeley, he was interviewed by statistician Jerzy Neyman.

Neyman supported his appointment, and Griffith C. Evans, the head of the mathematics department, at first agreed and even convinced university president Robert Sproul that it was the correct decision, only to subsequently balk, citing the concerns of his wife.

"[17][18] He was offered a post at Southern University at Baton Rouge, which he held in from 1942 to 1943, followed by a year as an Instructor at Clark College in Atlanta.

In 1947, while at Howard, Blackwell published the paper "Conditional Expectation and Unbiased Sequential Estimation", which outlined a technique that later became known as the Rao-Blackwell theorem.

From 1948 to 1950, Blackwell spent his summers at RAND Corporation with Meyer Abraham Girshick and other mathematicians exploring the game theory of duels.

[24] Blackwell only briefly extended his research beyond zero-sum games to explore the sure-thing principle[25][26] as introduced by Jimmie Savage,[27] primarily due the real-world societal implications of the mathematical result,[clarification needed][28] particularly for nuclear disarmament[how?]

[8] They had eight children together,[30] three sons and five daughters: Ann, Julia, David, Ruth, Grover, Vera, Hugo, and Sara.

David Blackwell died of complications from a stroke on July 8, 2010, at Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in Berkeley, California.