Professor C.R. Rao at the International Conference on Statistics, Probability, Operations Research and Computer Science

Cyrus Mehta joined colleagues including Frank Bretz and Martin Posch as invited speakers at the recent International Conference on Statistics, Probability, Operations Research and Computer Science in conjunction with the VIII International Indian Statistical Association Joint Statistical Meeting at Andhra University, Visakhapatnam. The guest of honor was 90 year old Professor C.R. Rao, one of the greatest statisticians of our time.

Rao is a Samuel S. Wilks and Mahalanobis medallist; a member of eight National Academies in India, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Italy; he has received dozens of medals, citations, awards, and other honors for his contributions to computational and statistical science. Rao was awarded the United States National Medal of Science, the nation's highest award for lifetime achievement in fields of scientific research, in June 2002. Rao also was named a winner of India's prestigious civilian award, the Padma Vibhaushan.

The conference accolades recognize a lifetime of research across a range of statistical frontiers by Rao including estimation theory, statistical inference and linear models, multivariate analysis, biometry and statistical genetics.

Speakers Cyrus Mehta, Frank Bretz, and Martin Posch were among the attending biostatisticians to commend Professor Rao and the impact his work has had on their own areas of clinical statistical research.

More About The Conference

International Conference on Statistics, Probability, Operations Research, Computer Science and Allied Areas
January 4-8, 2010
Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, India

More About Professor Rao

Academic Career

C.R. Rao received an M.S. degree in mathematics from Andhra University and an M.S. degree in statistics from Calcutta University in 1943.

Rao worked at the Indian Statistical Institute and the Anthropological Museum in Cambridge before acquiring a Ph.D. degree at King's College in Cambridge University under R.A. Fisher in 1948, to which he added a Sc.D. degree, also from Cambridge, in 1965. Up to date he has received over 30 Honorary Doctoral degrees from universities in 17 countries around the world. He held several important positions, as the Director of the Indian Statistical Institute, Jawaharlal Nehru Professor and National Professor in India, University Professor at the Univ. of Pittsburgh and Eberly Professor and Statistics Chair and Director of the Center for Multivariate Analysis at the Penn State University. As Head and later Director at the Indian Statistical Institute for over 40 years, Rao developed research and trained several leaders in Mathematics. On the basis of Dr. Rao's recommendation, the ASI (The Asian Statistical Institute, now the SIAP) provides training to statisticians working in government and industrial organizations.

Among his best-known discoveries are the Cramér-Rao bound and the Rao-Blackwell theorem both related to the quality of estimators. Other areas Rao include multivariate analysis, estimation and differential geometry. Contributions include the Fisher-Rao Theorem, Rao distance, and orthogonal arrays (described by Forbes Magazine as "new mantra" for industries). He is the author of 14 books and has published over 400 journal publications. Two of his papers appear in Breakthroughs in Statistics in the last century.