A stalwart, pioneer in field of statistics

{ C RADHAKRISHNA RAO} 1920-2023

- Kabir Firaque

Pioneering statistician C Radhakrishna Rao died in the US on Wednesday, statisticians in India told HT. Rao, 102, was professor emeritus at Pennsylvania State University.

Rao, born to a policeman and a homemaker in Bellary in 1920 (he would have turned 103 on September 10), earned degrees from Andhra University and Calcutta University, and a doctorate degree from Cambridge, before joining the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) in Kolkata, where he would later become the director.

It was at ISI that Rao made his reputation at the age of 24 in 1945, when he wrote a seminal paper in the Bulletin of the Calcutta Mathematical Society.

"That one paper has changed the complete statistics scenario. There are three fundamental problems he has addressed, which have impacts on every field of science: social sciences engineering sciences, biological sciences, every-where," said Rao's former PhD student Debasis Kundu, now a professor of statistics at IIT Kanpur.