Statistician par excellence
Indian American mathematician and statistician Calvampudi Radhakrishna Rao, C R Rao for short, was born in Bellary in Karnataka in a Telugu family as the eighth of ten children. After pursuing his early education at Vizag, he obtained a Master’s Degree, MSc in Mathematics from the Andhra University and an MA in Statistics from Calcutta University. Later he secured a PhD from the King’s College, Cambridge University and also added a DSc degree from the same University.
His abiding interest in Statistics led him to the Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta which had been established by the legendary statistician P C Mahalanobis. Rao had an opportunity to work with him as a Professor at ISI from 1948. He rose to the Director’s post in the Institute in 1964. C R Rao spent 40 years at the ISI till his retirement in 1982 after which he emigrated to the US.
Rao’s tenure at the ISI was extremely fruitful and his seminal contribution in the designing an experiment for efficient extraction of information and testing scientific hypothesis using the results of the experiment was great. At the ISI, he mentored students who later on carved their own niches in mathematics and statistics. He enjoyed guiding the students and often lavished praise on them for their projects and thesis.
In the US he established a centre for Multivariate Analysis at the University of Pittsburg. Rao worked as a Professor Emeritus in the University of Pennsylvania State University and also at the University of Buffalo. His sphere of work was not just restricted to Statistics and his discoveries had far-reaching implications on several other streams like Economics, Genetics, Anthropology, Geology, Biometry, Differential geometry and Medicine. Rao’s discoveries included the Cramer-Rao bound and the Rao – Blackwell theorem. His work in the field of estimation theory won him laurels from universities and organisations across the world.
Prof Rao was awarded as many as 38 honorary doctoral degrees from Indian and international universities and the American Statistical Association hailed him as a ‘Living Legend.’ Rao published hundreds of papers which he presented in India and abroad. He also authored several books and also co-authored books with several statistical experts. Many of these have been prescribed in the study courses colleges all over the world. He published his last scientific work at the ripe old age of 100.
He was a recipient of US National Medal of Science and the International Prize in Statistics considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize. In the citation for the International Prize the authorities had cited his contribution to statistics including his pivotal role in conducting of various research and inventions which are powerful in the field of science, even today. Incidentally, Rao was also once nominated for the Nobel Prize in Mathematics as well. Among the several honours that came his way was the Government of India’s National Award for Statistics presented under the aegis of the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation. Apart from prestigious awards like the S S Bhatnagar Prize, Rao was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1968 and the Padma Vibhushan in 2001. He established the C R Rao Advanced Institute of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science at Hyderabad in 2002 recognised as one of the finest in the country. The Pennsylvania State University instituted the C R and Bhargavi Rao Prize in Statistics in honour of C R Rao who had served the University for a long period after his retirement from the ISI.
Rao who was revered for his contributions in the field of Statistics and Mathematics breathed his last in Buffalo in New York on the 22 August 2023 at the age of 102 a month shy of his 103rd birthday. Glorious tributes were paid to his memory by people from all walks of life and by his innumerable students as well.
C.V. Aravind is a Bangalore-based freelance journalist.