In December of 1996, David Blackwell was told that he needed to attend the Statistics Department Holiday Party because of a special surprise. The surprise turned out to be a gala affair in David's honor, at which a new Festschrift volume of papers was presented to him by Tom Ferguson. Statistics, Probability and Game Theory; Papers in Honor of David Blackwell is published as volume 30 of the Lecture Notes-Monograph Series of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and was edited by Tom S. Ferguson (UCLA), Lloyd S. Shapley (UCLA) and James B. MacQueen (UCLA). The volume was created in honor of David by his students, colleagues, friends and admirers. The majority of the papers contained in the volume are in the areas in which David has played a major role: merging of opinions, nonhomogeneous Markov chains, the class of games called duels, the "big match," Blackwell optimal policies in dynamic programming, and, in the border between Game Theory and Logic, the "Blackwell Games." There are five review papers by David's colleagues in the volume. One is on the comparison of experiments by Lucien Le Cam, another is the Blackwell-MacQueen urn scheme by Jim Pitman, also the gambler's ruin by Lester Dubins, as well as one on De Finetti's Theorem by David Freedman, along with an historical overview of the creation of the Berkeley Statistics Department by Erich Lehmann. Five of the papers were written by David's former students: Howard Tucker (UC Irvine), Lambert Koopmans (University of New Mexico), Isaac Meilijson (Tel Aviv University), John Rolph (USC) and George Roussas (UC Davis).
The presentation of the volume to David was made by Tom Ferguson who, along with Jim MacQueen, had flown up from Los Angeles specially for the party. David was pleased to receive the volume and surprised to learn of its existence, even though he is a contributor. His co-author, Persi Diaconis of Harvard, must have supplied David some misdirection in saying where the paper was to be published.
Our congratulations to you, David!
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Festschrift volume. |
