Tanveer Singh Kapoor, Pune
Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao, one of India’s prominent statisticians, lost his life at 102 on Wednesday, August 23. His work revolutionised the fields of study ranging from business to medicine, economics to anthropology.
Rao was awarded the 2023 International Prize in Statistics, the equivalent to the Nobel Prize in the same field. His work spanned estimation theory, multivariate analysis, and differential geometry. His influence in the country is reflected in the operations of the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), the Central Statistics Office, and the CR Rao Advanced Institute of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science (AIMSCS), which was set up in Hyderabad in 2013.
In his 70-year career, Rao trained about 71 doctorate students. Among them, many are luminaries in their domains. The most well-known include R Ranga Rao, KR Parthasarathy, VS Varadarajan, and SRS Varadhan, who received the Abel Prize 2007.
He held several key positions, including University Professor at the University of Pittsburgh, Director of the Indian Statistical Institute, Jawaharlal Nehru Professor and National Professor in India, and Eberly Professor and Chair of Statistics and Director of the Center for Multivariate Analysis at Pennsylvania State University. Rao received many honours, including Padma Bhushan in 1968 and Padma Vibhushan in 2001.
Rao was known to have exemplary mathematics skills from the age of six. He wrote his autobiography, Glimpses of India’s Statistical Heritage, a collection of essays edited by SK Mitra, JK Ghosh, and KR Parthasarathy.
He was born in September 1920 to a Telugu family in Karnataka’s Huvinna Hadagali. He finished his schooling in Gudur, Nandigama, Nuzmid, and Visakhapatnam. He did an MSc in mathematics at Andhra University and an MA in statistics at Calcutta University in 1943. Additionally, he received his PhD at King’s College at Cambridge University, completing his DSc degree from the same university in 1965.