Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao, an Indian-American statistician, has been given the 2023 International Prize in Statistics, which is considered the Nobel Prize for statistics. He is 102 years old.
Who is C. R. Rao?
- R. Rao is an Indian-American statistician and mathematician.
- He is now an emeritus professor at Pennsylvania State University and a research professor at the University of Buffalo.
- Rao has received various honors, including colloquia, honorary degrees, and festschrifts, as well as the US National Medal of Science in 2002.
- According to the American Statistical Association, he is “a living legend whose work has had far-reaching implications for fields as diverse as economics, genetics, anthropology, geology, national planning, demography, biometry, and medicine.”
- Rao was named one of the top ten Indian scientists of all time by the Times of India.
Rao’s Revolutionary Paper
- “Information and accuracy attainable in the estimation of statistical parameters,” a research work, was published in the Bulletin of the Calcutta Mathematical Society in 1945.
- The study established a lower bound on the variance of an unbiased estimate for a finite sample, which has subsequently become a mathematical statistics cornerstone.
Key findings from his research
Rao’s 1945 paper yielded three results.-
- The Cramer-Rao inequity: It constrains the variance of an unbiased estimate for a finite sample.
- Rao-Blackwell Theorem: It describes how to enhance an estimate to get to an optimal estimate.
- Information geometry is a new interdisciplinary field that combines principles from differential geometry with statistics, including the concepts of metric, distance, and measure.
Source: https://www.livemint.com/opinion/columns/crrao-statistical-genius-teacher-institutionbuilder-11660669604502.html