Indian-American mathematician CR Rao awarded International Prize in Statistics at 102

By Press Trust of India: Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao, a distinguished Indian-American mathematician and statistician, will acquire the 2023 International Prize in Statistics, the equal to the Nobel Prize throughout the self-discipline, for his monumental work 75 years previously that revolutionised statistical contemplating.

Rao’s work, better than 75 years previously, continues to exert a profound have an effect on on science, the International Prize in Statistics Foundation talked about in an announcement.

Rao, who’s now 102, will acquire the prize, which comes with $80,000 award, this July on the biennial International Statistical Institute World Statistics Congress in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

“In awarding this prize, we celebrate the monumental work by C R Rao that not only revolutionized statistical thinking in its time but also continues to exert enormous influence on human understanding of science across a wide spectrum of disciplines,” talked about Guy Nason, chair of the International Prize in Statistics Foundation.

ALSO READ | ‘Painful to look at’: Priyanka Chaturvedi as Shinde, Fadnavis go to Ayodhya’s Ram temple

In his excellent 1945 paper revealed throughout the Bulletin of the Calcutta Mathematical Society, Rao demonstrated three primary outcomes that paved the easiest way for the stylish self-discipline of statistics and provided statistical devices carefully utilized in science proper now, the Foundation talked about in an announcement on April 1.

The first, now usually known as the Cramer-Rao lower positive, provides a technique for realizing when a means for estimating a quantity is sort of pretty much as good as any approach could also be, it talked about.

The second consequence, named the Rao-Blackwell Theorem (because of it was discovered independently by eminent statistician David Blackwell), provides a technique for transforming an estimate right into a better—in fact, an optimum—estimate. Together, these outcomes kind a foundation on which plenty of statistics is constructed, the assertion talked about.

And the third consequence provided insights that pioneered a model new interdisciplinary self-discipline that has flourished as “information geometry.” Combined, these outcomes help scientists additional successfully extract data from data, the assertion added.

Information geometry has recently been used to assist the understanding and optimization of Higgs boson measurements on the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest and strongest particle accelerator.

It has moreover found functions in newest evaluation on radars and antennas and contributed significantly to developments in artificial intelligence, data science, signal processing, kind classification, and movie segregation.

The Rao-Blackwell course of has been utilized to stereology, particle filtering, and computational econometrics, amongst others, whereas the Cramer-Rao lower positive is of good significance in such quite a few fields as signal processing, spectroscopy, radar strategies, numerous image radiography, hazard analysis, and quantum physics.

Rao was born to a Telugu family in Hadagali, Karnataka. His schooling was completed in Gudur, Nuzvid, Nandigama, and Visakhapatnam, all in Andhra Pradesh.

He obtained an MSc in arithmetic from Andhra University and an MA in statistics from Calcutta University in 1943.

He obtained a PhD diploma at King’s College at Cambridge University. He added a DSc diploma, moreover from Cambridge, in 1965.

Rao first labored on the Indian Statistical Institute and the Anthropological Museum in Cambridge.

Later he held numerous mandatory positions, as a result of the Director of the Indian Statistical Institute, Jawaharlal Nehru Professor and National Professor in India, University Professor on the University of Pittsburgh and Eberly Professor and Chair of Statistics and Director of the Center for Multivariate Analysis at Pennsylvania State University.

He is presently a professor emeritus at Pennsylvania State University and Research Professor on the University at Buffalo.

Rao has obtained many honours. He was awarded the title of Padma Bhushan by the Indian Government (1968) and Padma Vibhushan in 2001.

ALSO READ | Remembering Kalpana Chawla, India’s bravest daughter who conquered the celebrities

The International Prize in Statistics is awarded every two years by a collaboration amongst 5 essential worldwide statistics organisations.

The prize recognises a critical achievement by an individual or employees throughout the statistics self-discipline, notably an achievement of extremely efficient and genuine ideas which have led to smart functions and breakthroughs in numerous disciplines.

The prize is modelled after the Nobel prizes, Abel Prize, Fields Medal and Turing Award.

The first International Prize in Statistics was awarded in 2017 to David R Cox for the occasion of the Cox proportional hazards model, which allows researchers to analysis affected individual survival fees in superior analysis.

Bradley Efron obtained the award in 2019 for a statistical approach usually known as the bootstrap, a clever computational approach for assessing uncertainty in utilized statistics. Nan Laird obtained the award in 2021 for the occasion of extremely efficient methods which have made potential the analysis of superior longitudinal analysis.

Published On:

Apr 10, 2023