CR Rao wins International Prize in Statistics 2023

Tags: Awards

Kalyampudi Radhakrishna Rao, an Indian-American statistician won the 2023 International Prize in Statistics.

An Overview of the News

• Rao will be honoured with the award at the International Statistical Institute's World Statistics Congress in Ottawa, Canada in July.
• The prize will be awarded for Rao's groundbreaking paper, 'The Information and Accuracy Obtained in the Estimation of Statistical Parameters', published in 1945 in the Bulletin of the Calcutta Mathematical Society.
• The paper was later included in the book Breakthroughs in Statistics, 1890–1990.
• The International Prize in Statistics is considered equivalent to the Nobel Prize in Statistics.
• The award recognizes individuals or teams who have made significant contributions to science, technology, and human welfare through the use of statistics.
• Five major international statistical organisations cooperate to award the prize.
• The award carries an $80,000 cash prize and is presented once every two years.

About CR Rao

• He is a renowned statistician and Emeritus Eberly Professor in the Department of Statistics, Pennsylvania State University.
• He was born in Karnataka in 1920 and has been associated with the Indian Statistical Institute in Kolkata since 1941.
• Rao has been honoured with several awards throughout his career, including the Padma Bhushan in 1968 and the Padma Vibhushan in 2001.
• He was also the recipient of the SS Bhatnagar Prize in 1963 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1967.

Rao received the Wilkes Medal of the American Statistical Association in 1979 and the US National Medal of Science in 2002.