The Book
David Blackwell and the Hidden Mathematics of Artificial Intelligence
In 2024, NVIDIA released the most powerful processor it had ever built and named it Blackwell. Almost no one who uses the AI it powers knows who David Blackwell was. This is his story.
The Story
The man they would not seat built the mathematics inside every machine.
David Blackwell was born in 1919 in a railroad town in southern Illinois, entered university at sixteen, and earned his doctorate at twenty-two. He would become the first African American elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the first Black tenured professor at the University of California, Berkeley — after being turned away, for years, from the very rooms his ideas would one day run.
His work — on the approachability theorem, the Rao–Blackwell theorem, dynamic programming, and information theory — sits quietly beneath much of modern artificial intelligence: the mathematics of acting well when you cannot see the whole board. The Architect of Uncertainty is the first adult narrative biography of the man, told against the sweep of the century that both made and refused him.
Why now
Hidden Figures for the age of AI — the man behind the name on the machine, made unavoidable at last by the industry that once shut its doors to him.
The audience is large and specific: the AI and data-science workforce, for whom Blackwell is a foundational figure; the history-of-science, mathematics, and African American Studies classroom; the more than one hundred HBCUs and the community of Black scholarship; and readers who made bestsellers of Hidden Figures, The Code Breaker, and The Man Who Knew Infinity. No comparable adult biography of Blackwell yet exists.
The Newsletter
Be the first to know when The Architect of Uncertainty finds its publisher — plus the hidden mathematics behind the modern world, in occasional, considered letters.