Decorated by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh with Indian Science Award at the 97th Indian Science Congress at Thiruvananthapuram, Professor Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao has turned 90. But age has not dampened his zeal for development of statistics.Popularly known as C.R. Rao, he is regarded as one of the brightest stars in the sphere of statistics and mathematics, having dedicated long years of his life for development of statistics, a complex subject beyond the reach of the common man.
In simple words, statistics is concerned with understanding the real world through the information and can be derived from classification and measurement. It might be a relatively new branch of science but with ubiquitous application, there is no branch of physical or social science which can do without the discipline of statistics.
Rao’s theoretical work helped lay the foundation of modern statistics. He has also concentrated his efforts on employing statistical methods to solve practical problems in such diverse fields as economics, anthropology, geology, medical diagnosis and national planning. Responding to concerns of industry, he developed “Orthogonal Arrays”, a method of experimentation through combinational arrangement.
The method is commonly used to improve and control the quality of manufactured goods. His evolution of estimation theory in small samples expanded the reach of statistical methods in the real-world work.
Rao was born in Karnataka but his family moved to Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh where he studied and obtained his master’s degree in mathematics. It was in 1940 when the Second World War was raging. Twenty-year-old Rao set out on a 500-mile train journey from Visakhapatnam to Calcutta after obtaining a first class degree in mathematics with a glimmer of hope of finding a job in the military.
He was not lucky enough, considered too young for the job. However, while in Calcutta, through a chance encounter, he visited the Indian Statistical Institute founded in 1931 by Professor Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, a Cambridge-trained physicist. As a last resort, he applied for a one-year training programme in statistics there.
Promptly, he received a positive reply from Prof Mahalanobis who admitted him to the ISI’s Training Section on January 1, 1941. The young man in the course of time turned out to be the world’s most well known statistician.
Thus began Rao’s spectacular career in statistics, a field he selected as a last resort, and he never looked back. Subsequent years showed that the ‘chance factor’ played a prominent role in his life and work. After an unconventional mix of study and work at the ISI, Rao was deputed to Cambridge University to apply the Mahalanobis distance analysis on some anthropometric data collected by the University Museum.
While in Cambridge, he also completed his Ph.D under R.A. Fisher, known as the Father of Modern Statistics. By this time, Rao had already done some of the most influential work that carried his name.
Rao does not hail from a family of academicians. His father worked in the police department under the British rule and had the designation of Inspector of Police when he retired at the mandatory age of 55. His mother Laxmikantamma was about 20 when she got married. She bore 10 children over a period of 17 years. C.R. Rao was the sixth or seventh issue.
Rao’s father was away from the house on duty most of the time and he saw very little of him. His mother looked after the children. He has been quoted as saying “my mother was a great disciplinarian, and controlled our day-to-day activities, prescribing the time for playing, studying and sleeping, Perhaps, this regimen helped us in leading disciplined and successful lives”.
Source: The Tribune, Chandigarh, India.
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