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CR Rao awarded math ‘Nobel Prize‘: The accolade, which comes with a reward of $80,000, will be given to Rao, who is currently 102 years old, in July during the biennial World Statistics Congress of the International Statistical Institute in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao, a well-known Indian-American mathematician and statistician, will receive the 2023 International Prize in Statistics, the field’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize. CR Rao made significant contributions in the field of statistics and its applications in various areas, including medical research.
The accolade, which comes with a reward of $80,000, will be given to Rao, who is currently 102 years old, in July during the biennial World Statistics Congress of the International Statistical Institute in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
“In awarding this prize, we celebrate the monumental work by CR 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,” said Guy Nason, chair of the International Prize in Statistics Foundation.
Three fundamental results that paved the way for the modern field of statistics and provided statistical tools that are heavily used in science today were demonstrated by CR Rao in his remarkable 1945 paper that was published in the Bulletin of the Calcutta Mathematical Society.
The first, now referred to as the Cramer-Rao lower bound, offers a way to determine when an estimation technique is as accurate as it can be.
The second finding, known as the Rao-Blackwell Theorem, after the discovery of it by renowned statistician David Blackwell, offers a method for improving an estimate to an ideal one. These findings collectively serve as the cornerstone around which much of statistics is constructed.
The third conclusion, dubbed “information geometry,” offered insights that helped establish a brand-new multidisciplinary area that has since prospered. These findings collectively enable scientists to mine data more effectively for insights.
The Large Hadron Collider, the biggest and most potent particle accelerator in the world, has recently employed information geometry to help explain and optimise Higgs boson observations. Recent research on radars and antennas has also found use for it, and it has made major contributions to the fields of artificial intelligence, data science, signal processing, shape categorization, and image segregation.
CR Rao education, profession and various accolades
Rao was born in Hadagali, Karnataka, to a Telugu family. He completed his school education in Andhra Pradesh.
In 1943, he earned an MA in statistics from Calcutta University and an MSc in mathematics from Andhra University. In King’s College at Cambridge University, he earned a Doctorate. In 1965, he added a DSc degree from Cambridge.
Rao’s first jobs were in Cambridge at the Anthropological Museum and the Indian Statistical Institute. He held a number of significant positions, including those of director of the Indian Statistical Institute, Jawaharlal Nehru Professor and National Professor in India, University Professor at 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 research professor at the University at Buffalo and a professor emeritus at Pennsylvania State University. Over the years, Rao has received several awards which honoured his work. The Indian government conferred on him the titles of Padma Bhushan in 1968 and Padma Vibhushan in 2001.
In his remarkable 1945 paper published in the Bulletin of the Calcutta Mathematical Society, Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao demonstrated three fundamental results that paved the way for the modern field of statistics and provided statistical tools heavily used in science today.
Article Credits: Wion