In the next few years, UC Berkeley's Evans Hall, housing the statistics department and faculty, will be demolished and its department placed in the new Gateway structure.  Evans Hall was named after Griffith Evans who chaired Berkeley's mathematics department until 1949 and brought many prominent mathematicians to Berkeley, including Jerzy Neyman, one of the pre-eminent statisticians of the 20th century.

In 1942, a rising young mathematician named David Blackwell wanted to come to Berkeley and join the mathematics faculty and its excellent researchers.  Jerzy Neyman requested that the department hire David Blackwell as a professor in the mathematics department.   However, at that time it was controversial to employ a black professor at a major university and Blackwell remained in Howard University’s mathematics department and became chairman there.

In 1954, 12 years after Jerzy Neyman interviewed and requested him, David Blackwell came to Berkeley from Howard University as a visiting professor. The following year he accepted a position as Professor of Statistics and he spent most of his extraordinary career in Evans Hall, proving over the years, to be one of the great statisticians of our time.  

While a UC dormitory was named for David Blackwell in 2018, a  fitting tribute to this extraordinary human being, as well as an inspiration to young mathematicians and statisticians everywhere, would be to name a hall in the new Gateway structure after David Blackwell.  The times seem right for this naming.

We herewith petition Carol Christ, UC Berkeley Chancellor, the UC Board of Regents, and the naming committees for the Gateway project, to name a hall in the new Gateway structure after David Blackwell, so the new building that houses the statistics department will be "David Blackwell Hall."