Central idea: Indian-American statistician Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao has been awarded the 2023 International Prize in Statistics, which is considered the Nobel Prize for statistics.  He is 102 YO.

Who is C. R. Rao?

• R. Rao, is an Indian-American mathematician and statistician.
• He is currently professor emeritus at Pennsylvania State University and Research Professor at the University at Buffalo.
• Rao has been honoured by numerous colloquia, honorary degrees, and festschrifts and was awarded the US National Medal of Science in 2002.
• The American Statistical Association has described him as “a living legend whose work has influenced not just statistics, but has had far reaching implications for fields as varied as economics, genetics, anthropology, geology, national planning, demography, biometry, and medicine.”
• The Times of India listed Rao as one of the top 10 Indian scientists of all time.

Rao’s Groundbreaking Paper

• The research paper, “Information and accuracy attainable in the estimation of statistical parameters,” was published in 1945 in the Bulletin of the Calcutta Mathematical Society.
• The paper provided a lower limit on the variance of an unbiased estimate for a finite sample, which has since become a cornerstone of mathematical statistics.

Key outcomes of his research

Rao’s 1945 paper has three outcomes-

1. Cramer-Rao inequality: It provides a lower limit on the variance of an unbiased estimate for a finite sample.
2. Rao-Blackwell Theorem: It provides a method to improve an estimate to an optimal estimate.
3. Information geometry: It is a new interdisciplinary area called “information geometry,” which integrated principles from differential geometry into statistics, including the concepts of metric, distance, and measure.

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