C.R. Rao Wins Nobel Prize Equivalent In Statistics
Context:
Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao, an Indian-American statistician, has been awarded the 2023 International Prize in Statistics, the statistical equivalent of the Nobel Prize.
Points to Ponder:
- Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao, an Indian-American statistician, has been given the 2023 International Prize in Statistics, which is the statistical equivalent of the Nobel Prize.
- The prize is granted every two years to an individual or team who has made significant contributions to science, technology, and human welfare through the use of statistics.
- Rao’s work has influenced economics, genetics, anthropology, geology, national planning, demography, biometry, and medicine, among other subjects.
- His seminal 1945 study, “Information and accuracy attainable in the estimation of statistical parameters,” accelerated the development of contemporary statistics and its use in research.
- Rao was only 25 years old when he published this paper.
- He did his Ph.D. in 1946-1948 at King’s College, Cambridge University, under the supervision of Ronald Fisher, regarded as the father of modern statistics.
- One of Rao’s papers in 1948 offered a novel generic approach to testing hypotheses, now widely known as the “Rao score test.”
- As early as 1949, he contributed to orthogonal arrays, a concept in combinatorics used to create experiments with qualitatively good results.
- Rao spent four decades at the Indian Statistical Institute after joining there by chance after being unable to find a scholarship or a job elsewhere.
- His work has been lauded as influential and revolutionary, with some describing to him as “the person who did the most to continue [P.C.] Mahalanobis’s work as a statistician leader in India.”
- His contributions to statistics have had an impact on many sectors and are still relevant today, as indicated by his latest award.
