Dr. Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao

Featured Author: Calyampudi R. Rao

Calyampudi R. Rao was born (10 September 1920) in Huvanna Hadagali, now in Karnataka State, India. He is the eighth of ten children. In 1941 he obtained an M.A. in math from Andhra University in Waltair, Andhra Pradesh, and in 1943 an M.A. in Statistics from Calcutta University in Kolkata, West Bengal. He joined the ISI (Indian Statistical Institute) in 1943 as a research Scholar. He spent two years (1946-1948) in Cambridge, UK, working in the Museum of Ethnology and Anthropology. During this period, he wrote a thesis with R.A.Fisher as advisor and earned a Ph.D. degree from Cambridge University. He worked at the Indian Statistical Institute until mandatory retirement at age 60, whereupon he took up a professorship at the University of Pittsburgh, and later Eberly Professorship in statistics (now emeritus) and a directorship of the Center for Multivariate Analysis at Pennsylvania State University (USA), where he works to this day.

Prof. Rao ranks among the most notable statisticians of the last half of the 20th century. He has served as president of all the major statistical societies. He is a Fellow of the major scientific academies of the USA, the UK, and India. Besides the Sc.D. degree of Cambridge University based on a peer review of his contributions, he has received at least 32 honorary doctorates from universities in 18 countries, and has been honored with medals from countries worldwide, including the United States National Medal of Science. He has directly supervised more than 50 Ph.D. students who have in turn yielded more than 350 Ph.D.’s.

Prof. Rao’s contributions to statistics have been numerous and varied, comprising 14 books and more than 350 academic papers. His most famous discoveries include the Cramer-Rao bound, Rao’s Score test, the Rao-Blackwell theorem, Orthogonal Arrays, and the Analysis of Dispersion (MANOVA) in multivariate analysis.

For more information, visit http://www.stat.psu.edu/people/faculty/crrao.html

Scholarpedia articles:

Fisher-Rao metric. Scholarpedia, 4(2):7085. (2009).

Rao-Blackwell theorem. Scholarpedia, 3(8):7039. (2008).

Cramér-Rao bound. Scholarpedia, 3(8):6533. (2008).

Second order efficiency. Scholarpedia, under review.

Rao score test. Scholarpedia, under review.

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